A Comparative Analysis of Floral Scent Compounds in Intraspecific Cultivars of Prunus mume with Different Corolla Colours

Abstract

Prunus mume is the only fragrant flowering species of Prunus. According to the previous studies, benzyl acetate and eugenol dominate its floral scent. However, the diversity of its floral scents remains to be elucidated. In this work, the floral volatiles emitted from eight intraspecific cultivars of P. mume with white, pink and red flowers, were collected and analyzed using headspace solid-phase microextraction combined with gas chromatograms-mass spectrometry (HS-SPME-GC-MS). In total, 31 volatile compounds were identified, in which phenylpropanoids/benzenoids accounted for over 95% of the total emission amounts. Surprisingly, except for benzyl acetate and eugenol, several novel components, such as benzyl alcohol, cinnamyl acohol, cinnamy acetate, and benzyl benzoate were found in some cultivars. The composition of floral volatiles in cultivars with white flowers was similar, in which benzyl acetate was dominant, while within pink flowers, there were differences of floral volatile compositions. Principal component analysis (PCA) showed that the emissions of benzyl alcohol, cinnamyl alcohol, benzyl acetate, eugenol, cinnamyl acetate, and benzyl benzoate could make these intraspecific cultivars distinguishable from each other. Further, hierarchical cluster analysis indicated that cultivars with similar a category and amount of floral compounds were grouped together. Our findings lay a theoretical basis for fragrant plant breeding in P. mume.

Metabolic, Enzymatic Activity, and Transcriptomic Analysis Reveals the Mechanism Underlying the Lack of Characteristic Floral Scent in Apricot Mei Varieties

“…The injection temperature was held at 250 • C. The GC oven temperature was started at 40 • C for 2 min and then was increased to 250 • C at a rate of 5 • C/min with a hold for 6 min. More details are provided in a previous study (Zhang et al, 2019a). The intracellular pools of the floral scent components in different varieties were detected as described in a previous study (Bao et al, 2019).…”

Recent advances of green pretreatment techniques for quality control of natural products

“…The recent applications of HF-LPME on the extraction of NPs are listed in Supporting Information Table S1, which also involve their research significance. The combination of headspace sampling technology and solid phase microextraction used in this experiment can achieve good enrichment and separation for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of NPs [37][38][39][40][41]. Some of these research were conducted to analyze the volatile components in the NPs to distinguish the difference in various interspecies, storage form, breeding seasons, etc.…”

Floral scent components in Rhododendron fortunei and its regulation by gene expression of S-adenosyl-l-methionine:benzoic acid carboxyl methyl transferase (BAMT)

“…2b). Benzenoids are commonly found in plant VOC [14] such as in Prunus mume [15], European Narcissus [9] and especially in rose [16] that more than 50% of the total released VOC is benenoids. Therefore, our results are consistent with these above reports.…”