ARIBIDOPSIS

The first step to identify biosynthetic pathway for any chemical or hormone is to find out presursors or metabolic intermediates. Ethylene is not any exception on that case. This mysterious two carbon gaseous hormone has precursors nad probably has metabolic intermediates. Around 1960s, different research group was trying to identify precursors or metabolic intermediates of ethylene.  Presursor identification for ethylene was not. It had two major issues.  Ethylene is not produced from cell free homogenization mixture. So, whatever anyone wants to do, they have to apply any chemical on tissue level and measure the conversion of that chemical into ethylene.  Ethylene is a simple two carbon component. As a result, a wide range of chemical treatment increase the production of ethylene. It had been misleaded scientists. For example, initially  linolenic acid, ethanol, fumaric acid, acetic acid, glucose,  sucrose, organic acids, propanal, b-alanine, acrylic ...

I'm back with ethylene-centric blog post series. Hope you took a look on the review of ethylene symposium, JSPP 2016 and last post about Nobel prize controversy . If you didn't, you are never too late to read those posts. I'm having around 10 days holidays, although I've experiments to do during that time. I promise myself to read and subscribers to write as much as possible on folllowing couple of weeks.  Unlike other plant hormones, ethylene is a gas. Detection and measurement for any hormone is critical till today. In one hand, a group of scientists were skeptical about ethylene as hormone and on the other hand, the measurement of ethylene was really diffiuclt. Keep in mind that we are discussing about the beginning of 1900s. Two features are required for a good detection method. Sensitivity and Accuracy. Before 1950s, ethylene measurement was a painstaking job. For example, Gane accumulated gas from 60 pounds of apples for around one month to detect ethylene ...