Do we really know the scent of roses?

ABSTRACT

Roses have been admired ever since antiquity. They have followed all of the human history for reasons other than just medicine and food, mostly because of their beauty and their fragrance. They have always been used in perfumes, in gardens, and yet again in the cut flower market. Humans have listed more than 25,000 cultivars to this day, while there are only a little over a hundred species in the wild. In this review, we will present the domestication history of roses used for perfumes, and the selection of garden roses and cut rose cultivars. We will also compare the scent of modern roses and wild roses and give the chemical analysis of representative volatile compounds that have been characterized in roses. We will then summarize the biochemical pathways that have been studied in roses at the gene level. We will conclude that scent is not a trait in itself but a multitude of traits driven by many genes. Their alleles could perhaps be used as markers for the selection of new cultivars.

KEYWORDS:

• Rose
• scent
• terpenes
• essential oil
• biosynthetic pathways
• volatile compounds
• chemical ecology
• specialized metabolites

Acknowledgments

Authors wish to thank Guillaume Beaugey, and Sonja Meilland for discussion on rose cultivars, Valéry Malécot for his advices on rose names, GDR MediatEC (CNRS #3658) for discussion on chemical ecology, and Frédéric Hache (English Department, Saint-Etienne University) for English corrections.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

J.C.C and S.B. wrote the paper. I.A., C.C. and S.N.P. made the sampling and GC analyses of Table 1.

Additional information

Funding

Work on NUDX is granted by French ANR program “Rosascent” [grant number ANR-16-CE20-0024-01 to S.B.]