“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” wrote Shakespeare, but many popular flowers today have lost the heady bouquet they had in the days of the Bard. As plants have been bred to maximize characteristics such as color, shape and long-lasting blooms after cutting, the scents have disappeared — but no one knows why.

Natalia Dudareva, associate professor of horticulture at Purdue, is one of the few scientists in the world working to answer that question.

Her breakthroughs have landed her the 2005 Agricultural Research Award from the Purdue College of Agriculture.

The award recognizes research excellence by a faculty member with less than 15 years of experience beyond the PhD. It carries a prize of $10,000 for the recipient’s research program.

“Dr. Dudareva runs one of the world’s leading research programs in the biology of floral scent, a field that has long perplexed agricultural scientists,” says Randy Woodson, dean of Purdue Agriculture. “She is richly deserving of the Agricultural Research Award.”

Ed Ashworth, head of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, says improving floral scent is a goal of the $20 billion per year horticulture industry, but it is also important to agriculture. Almost three-fourths of all crops depend on insect pollinators, such as honeybees, which are attracted by floral scents.

“Dr. Dudareva is a first-class scientist who has applied solid scientific principles to solving an important agricultural problem,” Ashworth says.

Dudareva’s research also has important implications for researchers trying to harness plant pathways to produce essential oils, often used as flavor additives in food and medicine or as fragrance in body-care products.

Dudareva, a Purdue faculty member since 1997, grew up in Soviet Russia and began her studies of floral scent in the mid 1990s.

Contact Dudareva at dudareva@purdue.edu