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Does Viagra really help preserve flowers?
I didn't find a dateline, but the URL suggests that this might be from February, 2020.
https://botany.one/2020/02/does-viagra-really-help-preserve-flowers/
Machine translation, except where credited.
Does Viagra really help preserve flowers?
Alun Salt
If your beloved brings you flowers and Viagra for Valentine’s Day, it might not pay to get too excited. They could just be really into horticulture. Viagra, it is said, can preserve cut flowers from wilting.
However, tracking the scientific publication that demonstrates this is hard.
What is evidence that Viagra prolongs flower life?
It’s surprisingly limp.
If you search for a connection between plants and Viagra, it seems to start with a report in the British Medical Journal, Viagra makes flowers stand up straight. The report mentions work by Lesem and Wills on nitric oxide, published in Plant Physiology and Biochemistry on how nitric oxide can delay senescence. It looks like the Viagra discovery popped up during work in Ya’acov Leshem’s lab, and it was going to be part of a presentation at a conference. The key paragraph from the BMJ article is:
[...]
The BMJ article is behind a paywall, but the contemporaneous Wired article, Flaccid Flowers Bloom on Viagra, gets most of the details included in the BMJ. Leshem told Wired, “Aging in plants and in men is connected to the decrease in normal production of a molecule called cyclic GMP (guanosyl monophosphate),” Leshem explained. “This leads to a decrease in the plasticity of the spongy tissue in the male penis and in plants. This is part and parcel of the normal biological process.”
[...]
Does Viagra really help preserve flowers?
Alun Salt
If your beloved brings you flowers and Viagra for Valentine’s Day, it might not pay to get too excited. They could just be really into horticulture. Viagra, it is said, can preserve cut flowers from wilting.
However, tracking the scientific publication that demonstrates this is hard.
What is evidence that Viagra prolongs flower life?
It’s surprisingly limp.
If you search for a connection between plants and Viagra, it seems to start with a report in the British Medical Journal, Viagra makes flowers stand up straight. The report mentions work by Lesem and Wills on nitric oxide, published in Plant Physiology and Biochemistry on how nitric oxide can delay senescence. It looks like the Viagra discovery popped up during work in Ya’acov Leshem’s lab, and it was going to be part of a presentation at a conference. The key paragraph from the BMJ article is:
[...]
The BMJ article is behind a paywall, but the contemporaneous Wired article, Flaccid Flowers Bloom on Viagra, gets most of the details included in the BMJ. Leshem told Wired, “Aging in plants and in men is connected to the decrease in normal production of a molecule called cyclic GMP (guanosyl monophosphate),” Leshem explained. “This leads to a decrease in the plasticity of the spongy tissue in the male penis and in plants. This is part and parcel of the normal biological process.”
[...]
======
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1126921/
BMJ. 1999 Jul 31;319(7205):274.
Viagra makes flowers stand up straight
Judy Siegel-Itzkovich 1
Viagra (sildenafil citrate) is good not only for treating male impotence. Israeli and Australian researchers have discovered that small concentrations of the drug dissolved in a vase of water can also double the shelf life of cut flowers, making them stand up straight for as long as a week beyond their natural life span.
They have already tested Viagra on strawberries, legumes, roses, carnations, broccoli, and other perishables. In this latest research they found that 1 mg of the drug (compared with 50 mg in one pill taken by impotent men) in a solution was enough to prevent two vases of cut flowers from wilting for as much as a week longer than might be expected.
Professor Yaacov Leshem, a plant researcher at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and Professor Ron Wills of the food technology department of the University of Newcastle, Australia, also patented a safe, cheap process for increasing the shelf life of fruit, vegetables, and cut flowers using nitric oxide. The produce and cut flowers were fumigated with the colourless, odourless gas, an environmental pollutant that in minute quantities acts as the body’s most important signalling molecule.
The results of the applied research on nitric oxide were first fully reported in late 1998 in Plant Physiology and Biochemistry (1998;36:825-33) and have since been the topic of discussion at international conferences of the food storage and packaging industry. Professor Leshem will present his discovery at the opening plenary session of the September 1999 international conference on fresh cut produce in England.
[...]
13 replies
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