Some plants stink of rotting meat or dung, which helps them attract flies for pollination. How plants make the carrion stench, which is usually produced by bacteria feasting on decaying corpses, has been a mystery until now.
Several types of plants have independently evolved to make the fetid odor thanks to a few tweaks in one gene, researchers report May 8 in Science.
Scientists in Japan used biochemistry and molecular and evolutionary genetics to determine that three unrelated plant lineages hit on the same evolutionary trick to produce the smell. First, a gene called SBP1 was duplicated. (Gene duplication is a pretty common occurrence in the evolution of most organisms, including humans.) Then the extra copy of the gene mutated, swapping a few amino acids in the enzyme it produces.
