Your Per­fume May Soon Be Pro­duced by Bacteria

For cen­tur­ies, humans have worked to har­ness good smells. Bot­tling a scent required painstak­ingly extract­ing plant oils from crops often grown in far-flung coun­tries. The com­mer­cial fra­grance mar­ket, which is respons­ible for the scents in everything from food and drinks to clean­ing products and per­fume, relies on a steady sup­ply of these oils. But a nat­ur­al dis­aster or cor­rupt gov­ern­ment prac­tice can eas­ily dry up a source. In 2010, there was a short­age of patchouli oil, a fra­grance used in incense and per­son­al and home care products. Rainy weath­er in Indone­sia caused a poor har­vest of the shrub that pro­duces the oil, and vol­can­ic erup­tions and earth­quakes exacer­bated sup­ply prob­lems. Now, using microbes to man­u­fac­ture these scents is becom­ing a sweeter pos­sib­il­ity. Bit­ter orange, grapefruit, rose and san­dal­wood are some of the hard­est oils to obtain nat­ur­ally. Thanks to advances in bio­tech­no­logy, some of these scents can now be made in a petri dish. Biotech firms like Allylix, Iso­bi­on­ics and Evolva are genet­ic­ally engin­eer­ing bac­teria and yeast that can pro­duce plant oils by fer­ment­ing sug­ars. The com­pan­ies claim they can make vir­tu­ally any plant-derived molecule, it’s just a mat­ter of scal­ing up pro­duc­tion. Some of the first products being out­sourced to microbes are the cit­rus molecules valen­cene (found in the peel of Valen­cia oranges) and nootkatone (found in grapefruit peel), com­monly used in fruit-flavored drinks and per­fumes. And there’s no need to go to Tahiti for vanilla: Vanil­lin scent, which is already pro­duced syn­thet­ic­ally, can also be made by micro­bi­al fer­ment­a­tion. Soon, we could be liv­ing in a world of microbe-made smells. Com­pared to pro­du­cing scents by chem­ic­al syn­thes­is, micro­bi­al man­u­fac­ture could be more eco-friendly, and still be labelled nat­ur­al. And your nose will nev­er know the dif­fer­ence. Ori­gin­al pub­lic­a­tion:
The Sweet Smell Of Microbes — Fla­vor and fra­grance molecules made by fer­ment­a­tion prom­ise abund­ance regard­less of the weath­er. Chem­ic­al & Engin­eer­ing News. Volume 90 Issue 29, pp. 25 – 29; Issue Date: July 16, 2012 Source: Chem­ic­al & Engin­eer­ing News