Her researchers have just made a discovery about one of the most precious ingredients in perfumery. A virus likely attacked one of the wild roses. The story began millions of years ago with the ancestors of the Rosoideae. An accidental duplication on a rose chromosome tripled the NUDX1 gene, found in many other plants and even in mammals, but in a single copy. In humans, it is a marker for cancerous tumors, but it's a whole different story on the rose! These no longer have viral activity, but they retained the ability to randomly jump from one chromosome to another, sometimes causing genes to change function. This is what happened, for example, with the color of blood oranges. As often happens, the intruder settled in the chromosome of its victim. Science has already identified hundreds of molecules produced in the petals, including three main ones: citronellol from citronella, phenylethanol from tomatoes, and geraniol from geranium. Grasse-Atelier