We finally know how durian got so stinky

Durian fruit is well known for it's very strong smell. One might say it smells like sewage mixed with gasoline.

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Durian, best known in the United States as a fruit so stinky it caused the normally unflappable Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods fame to gag, has an unexpected (though arguably as pungent) cousin. In a study published today in Nature Genetics, researchers sequenced durian’s genome to reveal not only the source of its distinctive stench, but also the fact that it shares family ties with cacao—the plant that gives us fragrant joy in the form of chocolate.

“Now that we have the genome sequence of durian, we can compare them to different plant sequences that are in the public domain,” says study author Patrick Tan a biomedical researcher at Singapore’s Dune-NUS Medical School. “A number of interesting features came up. We found that durian’s closest earliest ancestor is the cacao plant.”

Once you know that cacao and durian share an ancestry, the similarities can’t be unseen: on the inside, the two fruits do look a lot alike. But it wasn’t a sneaking suspicion about the durian lineage that drove Tan, along with his colleague Bin Tean Teh, to sequence the fruit’s genome. It was love.

“Durian fascinates people in this part of the world,” says Tean Teh. “We love durian. And, coupled with our scientific curiosity, we felt that it would be great to look at it. We wanted to be able to answer some of the obvious questions regarding this fruit, for example its strong smell.”

Tean Teh and Tan leveraged three different genetic sequencing techniques, which together allowed the researchers to assemble the genome like a puzzle. One technique called Illumina short reads sequencing is kind of like taking a picture in your phone's panorama mode. Just as your device can stitch together a series of photos to create one long image, this technique takes short snippets of DNA and links them up to tell the whole story. This allows researchers to identify tiny variations at the basic levels of DNA, and get some fairly detailed information.

Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/why-durian-smells-bad

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