FOSSILS ET AL.

The Wide Wide Sense of Perfume

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So this next recitation is something like an affirmation of the chemistry of communication … PERFUME. Questions?

We’ve previously related infochemical activity over the span of Life’s history, from single-celled flagellates to algal colonies, from early amphibians to flowering apple trees. And now we arrive to survey chemical messaging in the present day, to detail the omnipresent array…

… beginning with hormones within an individual organism, often peptides or steroids traveling via blood, by which cells and tissues and organs signal to each other in order to affect growth or metabolism, reproduction or development…

… or such correspondence may be achieved by neurotransmitters stored in vesicles, often amino acids or derivatives released by neurons to cross synapses and administer nervous-system effects…

… or the interchange may be by paracrine regulators that originate and exert an action within a given organ, for instance cytokines involved in modulating immune reactions…

… or the transfer may be by growth factors or prostaglandins…

… or the messaging might happen externally through the environment in the form of semiochemical perfumes (ectohormones), which in turn might be classified as pheromones that act as messengers moving among members of a single species, perhaps to influence the physiology of an organism, these being primers that suppress ovary development or block pregnancy or synchronize ovulation or accelerate puberty…

… or perhaps to change the behavior of an organism, these being releasers that are sex or aggregation or trail or alarm or dispersal pheromones…

… or the semiochemicals might be classified as allelochemicals that carry information between individuals of different species, and these number so many as to be categorized further (though distinctions don’t always hold)…

… they might be allomones that benefit emitting organisms, exemplified by venomous defensive and camouflaging compounds, subdivided again as either antibiotics that poison or reduce digestibility or as antixenotics like repellants and locomotory excitants that disrupt behavior…

… or the allelochemicals might be kairomones that benefit receivers of the perfumes at the expense of donors, exemplified by molecular vapors that beckon to predators, for instance volatile compounds resulting from injuries to pine trees leading sometimes to the allurement of herbivorous beetles…

… or the allelochemicals might be synonomes that benefit both emitters and receivers of perfumes, exemplified famously by the fragrant emissions of flowers.

Shall I repeat that?

Published in Fossils et al. Follow to learn more about Paleontology and Evolution.

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