This Lab-Grown Perfume is Made From an Extinct Flower

Geneticists still haven't gotten around to turning ancient DNA into living dinosaurs, but a team of scientists has done something similar with extinct plant life. As IEEE Spectrum reports, Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic-biology company based in Boston, Massachusetts, has successfully concocted a perfume using floral scents that have been missing from nature for decades.

Taking a page out of Jurassic Park, the Gingko Bioworks scientists used old, damaged samples of organic material to reconstruct extinct DNA. Instead of mining caves for mosquitoes trapped in amber, they paid a visit to the Harvard University Herbaria, which houses millions of dried plant specimens. The plants they took samples from, which included the Falls-of-the-Ohio scurfpea, the Wynberg conebush, and the Hawaiian mountain hibiscus, all disappeared from the planet in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

To make perfume out of the lost plants, scientists had to reconstruct their terpenes, or the compounds responsible for odor. Using DNA from modern plants to fill in the gaps in the genetic code, the team was able to create 2000 gene variants from the extinct plant samples. Yeast cells were used to trigger gene expression, and mass-spectrometry machines helped identify terpene molecules in the expressed genes.

Once those molecules were analyzed, Gingko Bioworks sent the terpene profiles to an olfactory artist named Sissel Tolaas, who mixed the molecules into an appealing scent. The Hawaiian mountain hibiscus perfume, which Gingko unveiled at their meeting in Boston last week, has a "piney, earthy" aroma, according to IEEE Spectrum.

Gingko Bioworks is selling its resurrected Hawaiian mountain hibiscus scent as part of an art installation that will be traveling the world next year. The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Cooper Hewitt in New York City are the first two stops on the tour.