AI hopes to help perfumers do not harm flora

Many of the most expensive perfumes in the world are created as a result of damage to trees. When some aquilaria trees are damaged, a dark fragrant resin is released from them, which turns into an agar tree, or oud, an ingredient so valuable that wild trees are illegally cut down in pursuit of it.

As a result, the populations of wild aquilaria were destroyed. But what if perfumers could create that smell without cutting down a tree? With the help of artificial intelligence, scientists are learning to predict how molecules that have not yet been created will smell by reconstructing the genes responsible for producing aroma in flowers that are considered extinct. Other scientists collected microbes from clouds and used them as a starting point to create new spirits.

Now scientists and biotech companies say advances in the field could soon allow the perfume industry to reproduce fragrances and compounds of endangered plants without re-harvesting.

“Being able to recreate the smell of an endangered plant would be a huge win for both the environment and brands,” said Alex Wiltshko, founder of Osmo, a division of Google Brain that has raised $130 million to develop artificial intelligence that can predict and recreate smells.

According to Wilchko, Osmo recreated the aroma of a rare tree from a piece of bark “the size of a finger.” The sample was analyzed by a spectrometer, artificial intelligence recovered the chemical formula, and the fragrance was reproduced in the laboratory.

BioHarvest Sciences says it has created a stable cell culture from an endangered Southeast Asian aromatic plant, allowing it to obtain its valuable compounds without culturing or harvesting the original plant.

BioHarvest has announced an agreement to produce 20 tonnes of the aromatic composition, with limited production expected to begin next year.

“The problem is that human demand can be virtually unlimited, while biological supply is not,” said BioHarvest CEO Zaki Rakib. “We believe biotechnology can help bridge this gap, not by replacing nature, but by allowing us to use what it has given us without putting it under constant pressure.”.

But conservationists and perfumers say such claims risk giving advances in perfume technology an environmental gloss they have yet to deserve.

“It’s called ‘preservation,’” says Mandy Aftel, an innovator in natural perfumes and the author and founder of Aftel’s archive of unusual fragrances. “Creating a synthetic version of the odor of an endangered plant will not save it.” She said producing a substitute does not stop people from buying the original or eliminate other causes of the species' extinction.

Synthetic perfumes themselves are nothing new: the industry has been largely using synthetic ingredients for more than a century, and machines have long been able to identify molecules in smell.

“What has changed is what happens after the data comes from the computer,” Wilchko said. What is new is forecasting. Osmo has trained its artificial intelligence on more than 5 million human reactions to smells. “This means it can predict how combinations of molecules will be perceived,” he said.

Other sources claim that artificial intelligence is changing the world in which perfumers work. Christina Agapakis is not a perfumer, but her work on restoring genes from preserved flowers has allowed for the creation of aromatic compounds that perfumers can use to create new fragrances.

Even artificial intelligence has its limits: a flower’s fragrance can consist of hundreds of molecules and vary depending on what part of the plant it comes from and under what conditions it grows.