Making scents: could AI help perfumers take pressure off endangered plants?
Summary
Scientists and biotech companies are using artificial intelligence (AI) to recreate the scents of endangered plants used in perfumes. This could reduce the need to harvest these rare plants from the wild, helping protect their populations.Key Facts
- Aquilaria trees produce agarwood, a valuable resin used in expensive perfumes, but wild trees are being cut down illegally.
- AI can analyze small samples of plants to predict and recreate their scent by reconstructing the chemical makeup.
- Osmo, a biotech company, has raised $130 million to develop AI that predicts smells and recreated a rare tree’s scent from a tiny bark sample.
- BioHarvest Sciences has created stable cell cultures from endangered plants to produce fragrance compounds without harvesting the original plants.
- Some experts say synthetic versions of scents do not fully stop the demand for wild-harvested materials or solve conservation problems.
- AI has been trained on millions of human smell responses to better predict how combinations of molecules are perceived.
- Advances could allow the fragrance industry to produce perfumes without continually damaging endangered plants, but conservation is not always the main goal.
- Scientists are also using AI to reconstruct scent genes from extinct flowers and microbes from clouds for new perfume ingredients.
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