New research reveals why chili peppe...( GAINESVILLE Fla. --- Despite the pop...)
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Despite the popularity of spicy cuisine among Homo sapiens, the hotness in chili peppers has always been something of an evolutionary mystery.
A plant creates fruit in order to entice animals to eat and disperse its seeds, so it doesn't make sense for that fruit to be painfully hot, said University of Florida zoology professor and evolutionary ecologist Douglas Levey.
But according to new research by Levey and six colleagues from other universities, chilies have a very good reason to make themselves hot. It boils down to protection.
Based on research on wild chili plants in rural Bolivia, the scientists found that the leading cause of seed mortality is a fungus called Fusarium. The fungus invades the fruits through wounds made by insects and destroys the seeds before they can be eaten and dispersed.
Capsaicin, the chemical that makes the peppers hot, drastically slows microbial growth and protects the fruit from Fusarium. And while capsaicin deters local mammals, such as foxes and raccoons, from consuming the chilies, birds don't have the physiological machinery to detect the spicy chemical and continue to eat the peppers and disperse seeds, Levey said.
The researchers' findings will be released today in a paper published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Levey and his colleagues were able to arrive at these conclusions because at least three of the approximately 15 species of chilies that grow in the Bolivian wild are polymorphic for pungency, which means that some individuals of those species produce pungent fruit and others produce non-pungent fruit. This provided the researchers with natural experimental conditions under which they could compare Fusarium attack on fruits with and without capsaicin.
Upon studying various chili pepper plants, the researchers observed a clear correlation between high levels of capsaicin and low seed mortali
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| Contact: Douglas Levey dlevey@ufl.edu 352-514-6670 University of Florida Source:Eurekalert |
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