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everyone, to Wednesday Nite at >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Extension
behalf of the Science Alliance, CWisconsin Public Television,
Wisconsin Alumni Association, thanks for coming to Wednesday
Nite at the Lab.
night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my pleasure to
introduce to you Dr. Ken
He's a professor here at the UW Madison Department of Botany,
and he's also the director of the Wisconsin State Herbarium,
which is one of the largest botanical collections in North
America.
molecular data to address Hiquestions of flowering plantof
evolution, classification,
conservation. I was a botany undergraduate at
UW Platteville, and I took a
In particular, he's recognized course in every one of those.
systematics of the orchid afamily, especially vanilla,e
pogonia, and the relatives. Dr. Cameron earned his PhD from
the University of North Carolina
He was a curator at the New York at Chapel Hill in 1996.
years. Botanical Garden for nearly 10
faculty. In 2008, he joined the UW
to me because he also, I think Particularly interesting night
called Vanilla Orchids: Natural inHistory and Cultivation.t
It's not every day that we get
and evolution. to talk about plants, vanilla,
Dr. Cameron to Wednesday Nite at Please join me in welcoming
[APPLAUSE]
Ken Cameron: Well, thank you
It's a pleasure to be here. Considering that next week's
speaker is talking about beer,
two of us ought to get together lagand create a new Wisconsinhe
float.
sounds pretty good to me. Vanilla i[LAUGHTER]nd lager,
It's a pleasure to speak with you about three of my favorite
topics: evolution, orchids
specifically vanilla orchids. And, although those topics may
seem sort of unrelated, in fact this week is the week of orchids
in evolution. Not only do we celebrate Darwin
Day next weekend here on campus,
Orchid Growers Guild is hosting their annual orchid quest at the
Alliant Energy Center.
speakers and plants on exhibit. And I hope everyone can make an
effort to attend at least one or
So, before we get started, I've heard that there are some former
botany majors amongst us. Some of you may have had course
in botany in the past.
to change your mind for a Iminute, clear your mind aboutt
everything you know concerning
So this typical lily flower is flowering plant structure.
about the parts of a flower. often used in textbooks to talk
because as we look at the orchid And the reason I say this is
orchids generally break the rules when it comes to flowering
plants. And as I move forward into
vanilla, you'll see that
lot of the rules. vanSo let's just consider thes a
orchid family for one moment. This is a very large family.
At least 800 different genera and more than 27,000 different
natural species.
Wisconsin, in fact. Of course, they're popular with
ornamental hobbyists, and there are well over 100,000 artificial
hybrids and cultivars that have been named and registered.
So this is a very large and diverse group.
Unlike a lily flower or another stereotypical flowering plant,
orchids only have one male
Typically one stamen and that single stamen is united or
entirely fused with the female
structure in the orchid flower pistil to form a special
you this in just a minute. called a column, and I'll show
differentiated from all the Moreover, oothers.he petals is
It's often called a lip or
And many orchids, as you know, labellum.
epiphytes. especially in the tropics, are
They're not parasites on trees, but they use trees as supports
high up in the canopy to capture
And to do that, of course, they have to adapt to that unusual
environment, and they have
structure called velamen that allows them to live high up in
the canopy in the air.
most flowering plants in that it's typically packaged into a
single cohesive unit called pollenia.
Their seeds are, essentially, microscopic, or at least
dust-like.
thousands of seeds in a given I'm orchid capsule.ns of
Unlike other flowering plants,
only a few cells at maturity, and they lack the characteristic
feature of all angiosperms which
to endosperm as a food reserve. is You may remember that fromng
general biology.
And then, finally, orchids Orchids don't have endosperm.
cycle, which makes them very require fungi in their life
In fact, so unique that there are actually parasites on fungi,
and I'll talk more about that in
But we typically think of fungi, a minute.
or causing disease or plant pathogens, but in this case the
orchid turns the tables and is
fungus. acOkay, so some of thesehe
structures that I mentioned, we look at a typical orchid flower
here, beautiful, showy. You can see the labellum very
characteristic here as a landing
pollinator. Dorsal sepals, lateral sepals,
lateral petals and so forth.
structures in total. So there are six of these
flower, unlike the lily that we Awere looking down at, is the
column, that white elongated
And down here, in this structure.
the column. rI've turned it upside down ad
little bit so that you can see
receptive for the pollen, and it's actually a depression
filled with sticky fluid. And then at the apex of that
column is the male anther where the pollen is contained.
You can't see that there, but assuming that an insect, like
this crane fly, perhaps had entered that orchid flower,
searched for a reward.
Orchids are deceitful in that Typically tregard.'t find one.
But if the insect withdraws from
this large packet of pollen, the the flower, it often carries
You can see, in this case, a pollenia, along with it.
to the proboscis of that insect. yellow glob of pollenia attached
structure. So, really quite an unusual
I mentioned the small seeds. In terms of their reproduction,
orchid capsule. If you tap it or blow on it in
the wind, this dust seems to
That dust, of course, are the aseeds.
And under a microscope, under a light microscope, there you can
see that the seed coat is only a
essentially transparent. single cell layer thick, so it's
undifferentiated embryo within You can see the very small
There is no food reserve. So this baby plant better find a
partner in order to get food
And in nature they do that by allowing themselves to become
infected by fungi.
embryos, undifferentiated Soprotocorms we call them.ed
Little globs of cells with
them. fOf course, the fungus thinks
it's found a food source, but the orchid quickly turns the
table and starts stealing carbohydrates from the fungus.
After a little bit of time and
these orchid seedlings, as you enough energy has been build up,
are off to a good start. can see in a sterile flask here,
and shoot and eventually will Tbecome photosynthetic and canot
manufacture their own carbohydrates through
photosynthesis. On the other hand, there are
quite a number of orchids that
photosynthetic at all. never bother to become
These are the so-called Themycoheterotrophic orchids.yl.
We have some here in Wisconsin. For example, the coralroot
orchid, Corallorhiza, lacks leaves, lacks green pigment, it
lives its entire life as a
One of the most famous in the world is from Australia, the
underground orchid, Rhizanthella, which I show here
on the slide. It lives entirely subterranean.
It flowers below ground.
marsupial dig these plants up and ultimately disperses the
fruits and seeds. But orchids break the rules.
They're very strange plants.
canopy, if they are epiphytes, I In terms of their life in the
specialized roots. mentioned that they have
roots aren't growing in soil. It's pretty hard to get minerals
and even moisture if you're living in the air, drying winds.
So many orchids have
their roots which, ultimately, pre-programmed cell death in
at maturity. results in a layer of dead cells
electron micrograph. So you can see that here in this
velamen. A spongy layer known as the
probably notice this white or silvery, spongy texture on some
of the orchid roots coming out
That's the velamen as well. In fact, some of these orchids,
like Polyradicion, many roots,
Florida, the famous ghost Porchid, never produces leaves.h
It actually does all of its photosynthesis through its
roots.
some of these pictures some green pigment at the tips of the
roots.
photosynthetic roots. Talk about breaking the rules.
So orchids are pretty strange in
Of course, I've mentioned that that regard as well.
And, in fact, if we consider they're highly diverse.
quarter million flowering plants that there are close to a
are the orchids, the sunflowers, species known, the big families
Orchidaceae, Asteraceae, and the legumes.
Now, I have to admit that there's a bit of a competition
between the Asteraceae people and those who study the
Orchidaceae.
orchids than there are I think that there are more
here. sunfloweThere's 27,001. see that
[LAUGHTER]
pretty close in terms of In any respect, they're
orchids, followed by the diversity, the sunflowers or the
just curious, the fourth largest legumes, and then if you were
around 10,000 species. family are the grasses with
of plants, the largest family of So this is a hyper-diverse group
And, of course, people plants on Earth.
process of evolution that brings interested in diversity and the
fascinated by orchids for a very us that diversity have been
And that's where Charles Darwin comes in..
Some of you may have heard me speak about Darwin's interest in
orchids at Darwin Days a couple years ago, but I'd like to spend
a few minutes talking about Darwin's contribution to orchid
evolution and the study of
So, Darwin, we know, was orchid diversity.
We know that, in fact, because fascinated by orchids.
on his voyage on the Beagle. he collected a number of orchids
specimen in London that Darwin This is an actual herbarium
Patagonia. collected while he was in
And that sketch of the flower is It's Gavalia patagonica.
Darwin didn't do a whole lot of illustrations on his own, but he
did sketch this orchid, obviously in the field, and I
think he was a pretty darn good illustrator.
You can see the actual living flower above.
And I think he did a good job of
structure of that flower. caIn fact, I would argue thatal
Darwin, despite the fact that we
origins and Galapagos finches and tortoises and all these
other different animals, I would
botanist. And I say that because following
the publication of The Origin of
subsequent books that Darwin Species in 1859, the eight
botanical subjects. He published, in 1876, a book on
insectivorous plants like the Venus flytrap.
He was fascinated by plants that
climb. could move or plants that could
discussion this evening is the But most important for our
there at number one, the next fbook that Darwin publishedt
immediately after The Origin of Species was a book about
orchids.
Which Orchids Are Fertilized by The VarInsects, 1862.ces by
Now, this is important for a
Number one, Darwin received a great deal of criticism, as you
can imagine, after publishing The Origin of Species.
I suppose he still does today.
that he hadn't given enough And part oexamples.ticism was
He hadn't substantiated or
So he used the orchids to help backed up his theory very well.
theory of evolution by natural substantiate and to prop up his
I also think there's a few other selection.
about this book. things that are interesting
the bottom, 1862. We're actually celebrating thist
year the 150th anniversary of this publication.
And so my students and I have actually organized a symposium
at the annual botany meeting
Darwin's contributions. The other thing that I find very
interesting in almost all of
necessarily the titles, but the Darwinsubtitles.re not
The subtitles really tell you what the book is all about.
And you know the publisher
they make them small. But in the case of the orchid
book, On the Various
and Foreign Ochids are Contrivances of Which British
Good Effects of Intercrossing. Fertilized by Insects and on the
And, in fact, a number of psychologists and historians of
science have pointed out the
little bit of a personal fact that Charles Darwin had a
inbreeding and outcrossing. interesWhy is that?on with
One is that the wealthy Darwin
Wedgwood families had intermarried for generations,
and yes, indeed, this is the
the famous blue and white sampattern that you can stillna,
purchase today. So two very prominent families
that intermarried for generations.
Now, of the 62 aunts, uncles, and cousins born in the four
generations founded by Josiah and Sarah Wedgwood, in other
words, Darwin's grandparents, 38, or 61%, of those remained
childless.
do with disease or lack of Now, you might think that has to
again, these were very wealthy, prominent families in England at
the time. And more specifically, a total
of 73% of the 26 children born
in this Dar-Wood family did not from the fireproduce. marriages
So there's some interbreeding going on here, some suppression
of reproductive success.
selection and how we measure If you remember natural
coming into play. In fact, Charles Darwin himself
married his own first cousin, Emma Wedgwood.
We know that you're not supposed
And several of their children died young, three of the ten, or
they suffered serious health
their seven living children probproduced grandchildren.ee of
So Darwin was clearly very
inbreeding depression, fitness interested in inbreeding,
success. as measured by reproductive
orchids? So how does that come back to
flower. I told you not to think abouty
that. Instead, think about the orchid
flower that I showed you a
you've got male and female sex minute ago and the fact that
Now, wouldn't you think that organs fused together.
self-fertilization, for selfing? would set the flower up for
put your male and female right You can't get any closer than to
So Darwin went through the book and gave many, many examples of
how it is the orchids avoid selfing.
In fact, here's a quote from the
Unless we bear in mind the book.
to follow in most cases from good effects which have been proved
astonishing fact that the flowers from orchids should not
have been regularly self-fertilized.
It apparently demonstrates
injurious in this latter that there must be something
in other words, selfing, process,
elsewhere direct proof. So lots of examples of that.
It is hardly an exaggeration
to s most emphatic manner, us, in that she abhors perpetual
self-fertilization. Was he trying to tell
something to the biologists or
know. But, nevertheless, it was very
important in helping to substantiate his theory of
evolution.
North American botanist, stated that if the orchid book, In fact, A with ray, the great
a few trifling omissions, had appeared before The Origin, the
author would have been
natural theologians. than anathematized by the
this day. It's Incredible detail.en to
And Darwin, himself, wrote to his publisher in 1861 saying, "I
think this little volume will do
show that I have worked hard at good to the details."s it will
So this orchid book was important then, it still is
today.
pulling out Darwin's quotes, and Some other quotes, I love
"You cannot conceive how the they're all online now.
I am sillily and very idly orchids have delighted me.
The orchids have been a splendid interested in them.
This subject is a passion with sport.
And even the portrait of the me."
potted orchid there. young Charles Darwin holding a
than almost anything "Orchids have interested me more
This guy was a botanist, and in my life."
The last quote that I'll put up hhere now as we work our way.
toward talking about vanilla is from 1861 to the director of Kew
Gardens, Hooker.
of writing to you today when "My dear Hooker, I was thinking
What frightful trouble you have your ntaken about vanilla. came.
You really must not take an atom
play than real work." morDon't tell my boss that.ore
[LAUGHTER]
He was obsessed with getting his Okay, so Darwin wanted vanilla.
vanilla, some flowering material hands on some material of
orchids are very special in the of vanorchid family.anilla
Now, you might not realize that if you just looked up the
definition of vanilla.
ordinary, conventional. Well, I'm here to convince you,
I hope, that nothing could be further from the truth.
As I mentioned a few minutes
species of orchids found ago, there are more than 27,000
one, vanilla, is a major throughout the world, but only
importance. And that's what we're here to
talk about today. Now, before I continue on, I do
have some ice cream for some
but while I'm speaking I also tastwant to test your nose.ture,
Got your schnoz cleared out?
the world's most popular flavors So, of course, vanilla is one of
And I'll be telling you more and also fragrances.
what I have here with me today about that in just a minute, but
The first is artificial synthetic vanilla, vanillin.
I have here a vanilla bean from a species called Tahitian
vanilla from Tahiti.
second species, vanilla Aplanifolia, one grown anda
processed in Madagascar and the other from Mexico.
Now, most of us grew up with
McCormick's little brown bottle in your mom's cupboard.
So that's, I think, what you're most going to recognize, but I'd
like you to sniff all four of these and appreciate the
different aromas, profiles, characteristics.
Think of it as fine wine or tobacco in that regard.
So feel free to pass those
Okay, so I just got back from Singapore where I was at the
World Orchid Congress, and I
hundreds of orchid specialists stood up there in front of
the world's most popular orchid. telling them that vanilla was
scratching their heads because And, of course, they were all
vanilla in their greenhouses. But the reason I think that we
can say this is when we consider
Worldwide imports are estimated around 2,100 metric tons per
year of cured vanilla.
around $250 per kilo. Now, if I've done my math right,
and I'm not the world's greatest
to $250,000 per metric ton or a mworldwide annual value of $525
billion.
You may be surprised that almost This is a huge market.
got up this morning and went to the bathroom, from your shampoo
to your conditioner to your perfume to your toothpaste to
your mouthwash, has vanilla in
Throughout the day you've probably encountered vanilla in
Coca-Cola, in Pepsi, in all kinds of yogurts and cereals and
so forth and so on. So it's very important.
Just a couple of bits of trivia.
metric tons of cured vanilla Madagascar alone exports 1,200
The tiny little island nation of each year.
to a billion Euros worth of French Polyvanilla.ports close
That was from 2006 data.
hectares planted in vanilla. Mexico has over a thousand
especially in India and parts of And developing countries,
catching up. Asia and Africa, are rapidly
almost 3,000 hectares in So, for example, India now has
Here in the United States alone, plantations of vanilla.
ice cream sales and ice cream iproducts, that's a $20 million
industry just on its own. So vanilla is big business, big
stuff.
products and our fragrances, as It's founI mentioned. our food
But this plant has a long and rich history dating back
thousands of years to pre-Columbian times.
We believe that vanilla was first domesticated in Mexico,
and the indigenous people in the
Totonac people are the ones stagiven credit for having the
discovered vanilla's magical
This history is actually properties.
Rivera, the Mexican artist. You can see this on the walls of
the palace in the Zocalo in downtown Mexico City.
This is the ancient city of El
You can still visit the ruins of Tajin.
And in the center of the mural the pyramids there.
Indians, in their traditional white garbs, bowing down to the
Aztec contingency that's here on
And what do we see at the center the right.
A staff and a vanilla vine. betwCan you see that?res?
That vanilla vine there with the
Now, if any of you have eaten dinner at Frida's down on State
Street, this mural is actually
restaurant. Of course, Frida's recently
closed so you won't be able to
But I was a little bit miffed because whoever did the painting
put the staff in the center but they left out the vanilla vine.
[LAUGHTER]
It's right there in the middle. So this plant, in fact, was used
to flavor the ceremonial
Aztec court and the emperor was cfamous for consuming great
quantities of raw chocolate which was barely sweetened,
pretty nasty, bitter stuff with hot peppers and cornmeal but
vanilla added to it.
these vessels with vanilla We have archeological remains of
were trading it. residue so that we know they
form of currency. Very important to pre-Columbian
civilizations.
still find farmers growing Of course, today in Mexico you
In fact, this gentleman that I vanilla.
told me that despite the fact that so much vanilla is grown in
Africa and Asia, here in Mexico vanilla is in our blood.
We know vanilla.
And, in fact, I couldn't agree It's part of our history.
So it's very, very interesting more.
Now, Europeans first encountered story.
century. vanilla early in the 16th
must have encountered the plant, The Spanish explorers we know
form of these codices, these and we have some evidence in the
pictographs, done by Mayans and indigenous people.
For example, the Florentine codex of the mid-1500s, that
particular plant that's illustrated looks very much like
a vanilla vine with beans hanging down.
And the one from 1552, in particular, which was labeled, I
can't pronounce that -- the black flower, probably not in
reference to the flower color but to the beans, to the vanilla
fruits being long and black.
a vine with roots and pods And sure enough, that looks like
So we do think that the Spanish explorers encountered vanilla,
and ultimately took it to Europe
But eventually the Spanish would to be cultivated.
They would become more lose interest in vanilla.
cinnamon and black pepper and infatunutmeg and allspice. like
Instead, it was the French who
and took the cuttings of the really became fond of vanilla
possessions and territories. vines to their tropical
Reunion and French Polynesia and Places like Mauritius and La
In fact, that region of the world was known as the Bourbon
Islands for the court, the
So when you see Bourbon vanilla on the label, it has nothing to
do with sour mash whiskey or
[LAUGHTER] anything like that.
of origin in the It's in reference to its place
and Mauritius and Reunion. Bourbon Islands, Madagascar
easy to set up. BSo, vanilla is a vine, and itty
requires a support structure. It prefers to grow in shady
habitats and rich soils and so
months after pollination, the fplants will, in fact, producene
succulent long, cigar-shaped
are the fruit of the vanilla so-called beans, which of course
Now, one reason that vanilla is so expensive has to do with its
processing. The plant is native to Mexico
but it's grown mostly outside of
Now, as you can imagine, the Mexico.
is from Mexico, is not found in natuMadagascar or Reunion orhich
Mauritius or so forth.
has to be hand-pollinated. So in fact, every vanilla flower
4:00 AM, in the middle of the Tnight, and they are receptived
for pollen between, like, daybreak and around 11:00.
By noon it's too late.
have very dexterous fingers go So, typically, young girls who
hand-pollinate. Each plant only opens one flower
each day, and they developed a
hand-pollination which you can very ingenious way of doing the
So it's a very laborious see here on the slide.
As I mentioned, nine months for the beans to reach maturity.
And then, of course, they have
cured and fermented and dried toand processed into the beansly
that we're passing around now.
kept doing this even after the So, of course, in Mexico they
the old world. Conquistadors took vanilla to
historical photograph of vanilla And you can see here an old
Mexico during the day to dry and beans spread out in the sun in
They typically are done, that's done on blankets or mats that
get rolled up each night and
fermenting, the chemical carried indoors to allow for the
Then the next day, brought out conversion.
evenly spaced. again, spread out,
And this goes on for months. At night, rolled up again.
three-month process. This is typically at least a
bringing us those beans that we can buy at Penzeys or in the
supermarket.
although Mexico continued to Now, I've mentioned that
world's vanilla, today produce and supply some of the
and above. Madagascar leads the world far
market is from Madagascar, and Half of the world's vanilla
gross domestic product. So important is vanilla to the
Madagascar economy that they
some of their bank notes, as you even depict vanilla vines on
So very important to their can see here.
Vanilla did make its way, of economy.
This seems like the stuff of course, to the United States.
or not, Thomas Jefferson, our lpresident, is given credit ast
one of the earliest known documented pieces of evidence
for the use of vanilla in the United States.
This recipe for ice cream is
own hand. wrThis is in the Library of's
Congress. And I'm not sure how well you
can read that in the center, but
of good cream, I think it says his recipe includes two bottles
of sugar, blah, blah, blah. fivPut this on a fire, firstound
putting in a stick of vanilla.
You can barely read it. So, Thomas Jefferson had access
to vanilla beans. We actually think that he
probably brought them back, actually Benjamin Franklin I
guess is thought, when he was ambassador to France, may have
brought back the vanilla beans
Thomas Jefferson. fDolley Madison served vanillao
ice cream at the president's
and from then on it was all full inauguration at the White House,
So we love our vanilla ice steam ahead.
Other parts of the world are cream.
vanilla. only now beginning to appreciate
and other parts of Asia, vanilla For example, in Japan and China
cuisine. has never been part of their
and I do quite a bit of field Bwork in China so I go there at,
least once a year, and I have started seeing vanilla products
and ice cream popping up all
Last year I went to the southern over China.
display garden here which was itrying to introduce people tos
vanilla.
cultivated, and in their gift shop you could buy green tea
scented with vanilla, and even
So this plant that we have loved black tea scented with vanilla.
long is now becoming quite in our western cultures for so
You can imagine that companies popular in Asian markets.
just salivating at the thought like Haagen-Dazs and Breyers are
cream market. So vanilla looks like it's going
to remain popular and continue
To recap, natural vanilla ranks as one of the most expensive
commodities traded on the world market.
The price, obviously, has fluctuated up and down for
various reasons.
introduced vanilla Coke, and Remember when Pepsi and Coke
a few years? that was a real popular fad for
corresponds right there to that Wspike in the chart.ch
And there's been some hurricanes
price has been fluctuating. thBut natural vanilla is stillhe
very important. And yet there's still so much
that we don't know about these
orchids. far from ordinary or plain
this is what interests me. And as a biologist, of course
Nearly the entire vanilla I'market, the crop, is ae.
monoculture.
from original vines brought over The plants are taken as cuttings
world, and now there are some fserious fungal pathogens and
other diseases that are affecting the crop.
You would think that there had
an attempt to breed the plant or been, somewhere along the way,
interbreed other species and to improve the crop or to
fragrances, but that isn't that improve tcase.ze or the
Here's an example of where I
This species, vanilla tgrandiflora, is growing in a.
palm swamp in Peru. I don't know if you can see that
there's standing water in that
some palm trees and a vanilla picvine growing up the palm.re's
To the right are the fruits from
Look at the size of these vanilla beans.
They're like bananas. [LAUGHTER]
And my colleagues,
region, said that if you allow who spent some time in this
sitting in your hut in your field camp for a few weeks, the
smell of vanilla is so powerful and so overwhelming that you
actually have to toss them out
much, too perfumy. of the house because it's too
standard species. Imagine We could really with our
improve the yield and some
hasn't been done yet. iIn fact, we know very littlet
about vanilla biology, which is where my own research comes into
play. So, I've been fascinated by
orchids since I was a kid.
when most boys are asking for a catcher's mitt or a basketball,
I was begging my parents for an orchid.
[LAUGHTER]
had to drive all over Detroit Sotrying to find an orchid.ht,
And she found one and you can see how happy I am about that.
[LAUGHTER]
in graduate school in orchids, That ultimately led to research
travel all over the world. and I've been fortunate to
of extra pounds since I was Aeight years old, down there att
the bottom right, I still enjoy getting out into the field.
That picture is in central
to a vanilla vine that I found. So, these plants have become a
passion for me as well. And you've already heard that I
recently published a book on
copies to sign and sell after vanthe lecture if you'reave
interested. But what I've tried to do is
capture some of the basic research that's taken place over
the last decade by myself and some of my colleagues.
So I'm going to walk you through
I won't have time to go into any some of these research examples.
buy the book. of them in[LAUGHTER]ut you can
Or you can send me an email or come visit.
So the first aspect, of course, I'm a plant systematist, which
means that I'm interested in
And in terms of the diversity, diversity.
relatives that are equally vanilla has a number of close
For example, on the island of New Caledonia in the Pacific
Ocean are two monotypic and endemic genera, Eriaxis and
Clematepistephium.
just like vanilla is. OnIn South America, we have ane
genus called Epistephium which
large, showy flowers, but they've resisted cultivation.
So few people are familiar with these.
I have a graduate student right now who's going to monograph
this genus. And you can see the difference
in size between those two species Epistephium.
Another group of close relatives
mycoheterotrophic. are completely
They're fungal parasites. TThey are the largest
non-photosynthetic plants in the
Some of these are enormous plant kingdom.
They can be 10 feet or more climbtall.ines.
Completely feeding on fungi in
Erythrorhiza, I photographed the soil.
I could actually see the Sydney Opera House in the distance from
that picture. I was really cool.
Lechanorchis I found on the island of Borneo.
Pseudo vanilla I photographed in
Galeola in Singapore and then Cyrtosia is from Japan.
Look at these big, fat, fleshy, red fruits.
Now, you would imagine that a bird may be attracted to those
and disperses the fruits and
It's never been documented in seeds, buthe wild. no idea.
There's still so much we don't
Even here in North America we have close relatives of vanilla.
For example, the genus Cleistes is found in Florida and the
southeastern US but doesn't quite make it up here to
Wisconsin.
northeast. Isotra is a wildflower in
deciduous forests. Found in pine forests and
Wisconsin either. DoeIt's in Michigan.t to
But one species that does make
right here. This is Pogonia ophioglossoides.
And this is a native orchid found in bogs, found all the way
up north in Wisconsin, even into
And it's a close relative of Canada.
So, some of my research has focused on phylogenetics.
In other words, trying to understand the relationships of
these orchids to one another and
DNA, molecular phylogenetics has to other plant groups.
determining these relationships, become an important tool in
focused on vanilla and so a lot of my research has
Now, being a botanist, I have the fortune of being able to tap
into three genomes in the plant cell of course.
There is DNA within the nucleus,
chromosomes. as you know, in the form of
mitochondria with their own DNA, And like animals, there are
botanists also, of course, have the plastid genome, chloroplasts
with their own DNA. And that's where a number of the
gene sequences have come from working with the chloroplasts.
And so over the last few years a
evolution and relationships has much cleareemerged.e of orchid
For example, it was always
to lilies, but in fact, lilies assumed that orchids are related
monocot tree of life, right are their ohere.anch of the
Instead, orchids, as it turns out, belong to an order of
monocot flowering plants known
implies, within in that order is as Asparagales, and, as the name
onions, daffodils, the daylilies asparagus but also agaves,
irises, and at the base of the which aren't true lilies,
So this was quite a surprise Asparagales are the orchids.
this relationship of orchids to wheasparagus and so forth.aled
My own work has taken that
further into understanding lineage of orchids and delved
orchid species. Of course, I can't do that.
That's a lot of data. But I've sampled most of the
major lineages of orchids with
out, we have a very good multiple genes, and, as it turns
family, so this family tree. phylogeny now for the orchid
point out is that there appear And the one thing I want to
orchids. to be five major groups of
subfamilies of the orchid family, and one of them, lo and
behold, the reason I got
altogether, one of these interested in vanilla
orchids. subfamilies is the vanilla
actually deserve their own They are so different that they
that subfamily Vanilloideae. subfamily status, and we call
primitive of the living orchids. And these are among the most
That was a real wake up call to orchid taxonomists because
traditionally the Vanilloideae
higher up in the family tree orchids had been classified
Within the Vanilloideae itself, wwithin the subfamily, my
colleagues and I have been
the relationships of these reconstructing the phylogeny,
mentioned to you. And I'll point out two things.
The two bold branches here
of Vanilloid orchids. One of them includes the North
American species, like Pogonia, so tempered orchids, but seem to
be evolved from South American
And then vanilla itself is relatives.
mycoheterotrophic parasites, related to those
are worldwide in distribution whbut ultimately with a Southese
American origin as well.
the relationships of these So we feel like we understand
And it was quite surprising, in fact, to see the closest living
relative of vanilla is a plant
these climbing, parasitic, like pseudo vanilla, one of
I don't know if you can see that leafless plants from Australia.
certainly this is a climbing very well in the slide, but
It has aerial roots at each node.
It's lacking leaves but it does have the long, cylindrical
fruits that you can see here
a vanilla plant. high up in the canopy similar to
living relative or the out group So now that we know the closest
delved even deeper into the genus vanilla itself, and you
can see here a preliminary
relationships. phylogeny of vanilla species
of things. And I'll just point out a couple
although they are green and photosynthetic, have also lost
their leaves. They're leafless green vines.
And that leaflessness, the loss of leaves, seems to have
occurred, I've marked them in green, at least three
independent times in the
Furthermore, there's a pretty clear split in the phylogeny of
vanilla between new world,
American, and old world, Asian meaning South America and North
So there's a clear biogeographic and African species.
all of the Caribbean species, which are all leafless, seem tot
be derived from African ancestors.
Now, that might seem a little odd except that in the Caribbean
islands we have a number of African orchids.
It seems as though hurricanes occasionally pick up orchid
seeds from Africa, carry them across the Atlantic, and deposit
them in Puerto Rico, and even south Florida every now and then
an African orchid will show up. So we know that they can move
around a little bit.
when they got to the Caribbean I also find it interesting that
And there are some other orchids they lost their leaves.
so there seems to be a pattern that have done the same thing,
The orchids are so pretty you have to show pictures.
So let's just see some of the diversity within the genus
vanilla.
We call them the membranaceous These are the most primitive.
very thin leaves. leaveVery unusual flowers.y have
They're quite primitive in
I'll point out one in particular.
Vanilla --, this is the only
genus vanilla. non-climbing species in the
It was so special when it was Thifirst discovered that thees.
botanist actually put it in its own genus, Dictyophyllaria.
It was only known from the type specimen in Brazil and hasn't
been seen for almost a hundred
rediscovered. So the botanist sent me this
photograph, and we actually have
And sure enough, it's a vanilla. a small DNA sample now.
rank, but it is the only It doesn't deserve its own genus
which kind of maybe gives us a non-climbing member of the group
climbing habit might have little clevolved. how the
In the old world, some really spectacular plants.
Big flowers, showy, bright
I love this one. labella.
Vanilla siamensis has these little whiskers on the labellum,
and its close relative from Mount Kinabalu in Borneo down
here, Vanilla kinabaluensis,
Some of these are also leafless, also has whiskers on its chin.
In the Caribbean, I mentioned, like vanilla madagascariensis.
There's a few species, you can they're all leafless.
And then, finally, the only species that actually produce
the fragrant fruits are restricted to the new world.
So they include vanilla planifolia, the common vanilla
of commerce and agriculture, but
odorata, vanilla --, close relatives like vanilla
in south Florida, and a few photogother species here. Swamp
I should have mentioned that
It seems as though there's only one group of vanilla species
that actually produce the fragrant aromatic capsules.
And I have a hard time
New Guinea and parts of Asia convincing some people in Papua
the forest and collect vanilla that you can't just go out into
them. pThey don't have fragrance.
It's only the new world species that do that.
Anyway, now that we've
have a good sense of vanilla reconstructed the phylogeny, we
very stable robust relationships, that has led to a
published along with some classificacolleagues. that I've
I won't go into that, but,
subfamily, tribe, and subtribe. We also can use the phylogeny to
do some pretty nifty things like
Only a few years ago the first molecular clock dating.
It was a bee, extinct genus of fossil orchid was found.
amber with orchid pollenia on beits back, on its thorax.n
And so based on morphological analysis, the people were able
to place this fossil within the phylogeny that I proved to them
and then dated the age of the orchids and the age of the
vanilla group.
common ancestor of orchids is at So you can see here that the
Cretaceous. leSo orchids were living withate
dinosaurs, basically. And the vanilla orchids, in
particular, in that blue box
back somewhere between 65 and 80 right there trace their origins
So this is an ancient group of million years ago as well.
They probably evolved in plants.
interesting biogeographic hypotheses that I've published
with some colleagues considering
continental shift and comparing pthat to the phylogeny of these
particular groups, and there's a
But even more recently, during very strong correlation there.
Pleistocene glaciation, we know that the Vanilloid orchids, like
Pogonia, were confined here to
United States but then also trestricted to eastern Asia.rn
This is a classic example of
We see it with trilliums and continental disjunction.
kinds of our typical spring Jack-in-wildflowers.and all
And so the phylogeny has allowed
questions as well. us to explore those kinds of
always interesting. VI'm not an ethnobotanist but I
got interested in the origin of this species in particular, the
Tahitian vanilla. So I passed that around.
You might have noticed that when
that it was really quite you smelled the Tahitian vanilla
Its chemical profile is more different from the others.
It contains heliotropin, which floral, fruity.
And that particular variety or is a floral fragrance.
islands of French Polynesia. species is restricted to the
we know that prior to European Now, this is an enigma because
vanillas in French Polynesia. And vanilla tahitensis isn't
found in the wild.
in Tahiti. It's only found in plantations
What's it origin? It's so different from all the
others in terms of its flora
so forth and so on. mWell, this is where DNA and and
little bit of forensic paternity
play. I got my hands on a number ofo
accessions of Tahitian vanilla. So here in the middle panel in
green is the Tahitian vanilla.
molecular systematics the fact And we have the fortune in
the mitochondria and the that the DNA of the organelles,
maternally. So they're only passed on from
the mother. Whereas, the nuclear DNA, of
course, is biparentally inherited.
You get half from your mother and half from your father.
So we sequence some chloroplast genes, which should come from
the mother, and we sequence some
up a paternal signal as well, and lo and behold we found thatk
all of the maternal DNA sequences the chloroplast genes
of the Tahitian vanilla were
the common vanilla of identical agriculture.lanifolia,
This made us think that Tahitian
But then who's the father? vanilla might be a hybrid.
And so we sampled a lot of Who's your daddy?
can read that, the paternal signal showed a wild plant fromu
Guatemala, vanilla odorata, a wild species.
So we think vanilla tahitensis
It's actually a hybrid of two neotropical species, planifolia
and odorata.
Of course, there's actually a Solot of legal ramificationsg.
because if you downgrade
hybrid, it loses some protection, and the Tahitians
claim this as part of their cultural heritage and we're
telling them, well, actually
Mexico. it'Now, the next question, ofom
course, is where did the hybrid come from?
Did humans make it? Did it occur in nature?
Did it occur in Guatemala and the Spaniards collected the
plants and took them to Tahiti? That we don't know.
We don't have a time machine, but certainly we've at least
answered some interesting questions.
I want to just quickly run
It's not all about DNA in my through a few more examples.
I'm an a traditional botanist as lab.
And I've done some work on seed well as morphology.ne jock.
When you buy vanilla, Breyers vanilla ice cream, the label
says with real vanilla bean specks.
Those little black spots that are in the ice cream?
Well, those specks are the
And here, under the electron microscopic seeds.
vanilla. microscope, is the seed of
thing. It's a big crusty globular
through the digestive tract of Clearly, it can survive passing
that, whether bird or mammal, is an animal, and it's quite likely
they eat them and they pass the attracted tseeds out.lla beans,
And that's really unusual in the
you how they have a very thin orchid famseed coat.e I showed
But look at the other Vanilloid orchids, the close relatives of
vanilla.
seeds. They've also got these crusty
round wings. Some of them have these big
or elm fruits. They look like elm seeds to us
filaments on either side of the This oncentral core.pillary
So a lot of interesting seed
Vanilla also breaks the rules when it comes to leaf
architecture. In general botany you learned
that dicots have reticulate leaf
have parallel venation, right? venation and monocots always
Well, vanilla kind of fits that pattern, and this -- does as
well, but look at these guys. Look at Epistephium and
Clematepistephium.
a very interesting adaptation Hifor life in the understory,on,
especially if you're a climbing vine.
Ovary structure is intriguing because most orchids have a
single chamber within their ovary and vanilla does that.
But some of these others, the placenta of the ovary actually
intrude to the central cavity and form a trilocular, a
three-chambered structure.
be interesting if you're Now, why would ovary structure
Well, that's where the good studstuff is.lla?
The good stuff, and I'm passing around the synthetic version, is
a molecule called vanillin. We probably have some chemists
in the audience so they'll
wrong, but vanillin is the probably correct me if I'm
involving glucovanillin, which byproduct of a reaction
but when it comes into contact is a non-aromatic, has no odor,
enzyme, there's a fermentation with the beta-glucosidase
vanillin. sSo the processors have knowno
this for a long time. They kill the beans, they chop
them up, and then they let them sweat and go through this
fermentation process. It's only been in the last maybe
five or six years that we've
chemical reaction was occurring in the fruit structure.s
As it turns out, and this graph here on the bottom shows the
location of most of the glucovanillin.
So the precursor molecule, as it
zone 4 with a little bit in zone turns out, is mostly found in
Zone 4, in the fruit wall, is right here along the interior of
that chamber. In fact, there are little
papillae, little hairs, on the
that's where the glucovanillin inside of the fruit wall, and
On the other hand, the enzyme, resides.
found in the outer green part of the beta-glucosidase, is mostly
It's like being in a chemistry the wall, zones 1 and 2.
over here in this glass beaker lab where you keep your acid
glass beaker, and you better not and your base over here in this
The orchid actually does that. let the two combine.
and its enzyme over here. It's only when we crush them and
we disrupt the cells that we
with the substrate and the bring that enzyme in contact
So here's my thought. glucoI like to cook.duced.
You know when you watch cooking shows and they tell you to take
a vanilla bean and slice it up
the seeds because you don't want the long way and scrape out all
custard or whatever. all that and put the pod in your
good stuff. All the glucovanillin is right
there in zone 4, and you're scraping away zone 4.
That's where all the good material is.
So, anyway, there's something to
of comes back to gourmet be learned in plant anatomy kind
And then the last bit of cooking.
this yet, but I find it a really research, I haven't published
It almost relates to this bird kind of fun example.
All kinds of new technology is call app.
better make identifications in coming into vogue to help us to
And with vanilla, the example is the natural world.
It's using DNA to help identify kunknown plant samples.
So, for example, in addition to vanilla planifolia and vanilla
tahitensis, there's a third species that one finds for sale
occasionally, vanilla pompona.
beans or a non-flowering sterile Now, if you were just given
the difference between those vine, how could you really tell
You could do some chemical three?
would be quite laborious. Instead, DNA barcoding shows
some promise as a cheap, easy,
of life in a manner analogous to fast way of identifying species
barcodes that we find on all the commercially ubiquitous
So, for example, let's assume we products in the supermarket.
cutting really vanilla were asking the question is this
If I'm going to pay top dollar tahitensis?
sure I'm getting what it says it for this plant, I want to make
Well, I'm a vanilla expert and is.
that's tahitensis. without flowers I don't know if
word for it. I'll have to take the seller's
these vanilla beans are from Can the buyer be certain that
Well, they just look like long, brown vanilla beans to me.
Unless you smell them or do some
certain. chemical assays could you be
and this particular nursery was propagating thousands of vanilla
cuttings. And I asked them what species
are these?
into the forest. We don't know, we just went out
I said, no, there's actually Isn't there only one vanilla?
species, so I may need to do almost a hundred different
what you've got there. some testing for you to tell you
leafless vanillas, then you're When you're looking at the
Which one of these is vanilla madagascariensis?.
Well, that one says it is according to the label, but can
we really trust the plant tag?
So DNA barcoding, I think, has These all look the same to me.
So I'm going to show you a case study that I've done recently.
Here's leafless cutting a friend
It was being cultivated in a of mine gave me.
That's all I know about it. So it's just vanilla species,
unknown species.
made a note that it is being I gave it my own number, and I
So how am I going to put a name culton this thing?ida.
Well, I could wait 20 years for it to flower, but I don't have
that much time. So I would probably go to a
standard key in the flora of
And assuming that this really is Florida.
a leap of faith, but if did evethat, I would work my way is
through the key and I would find
that region that are leafless, that there are two species in
vanilla dilloniana from vanilla barbellata, I need flowers.
All the parts here that distinguish them have to do with
floral structure. So that's not going to help me
much. So here's where DNA barcoding
comes in. The zoologists have rallied
around a single gene, cytochrome
mitochondria which seems to work oxidase 1, COX1 or CO1, from the
animal species from each other. quThere's a few problems.ing
The reptiles have some trouble
other groups. aBut it works quite well at
distinguishing animals species. But when it comes to plants,
that particular gene doesn't
Instead, I'm part of a group work very well.
of the Consortium for the cBarcode of Life, and in theup
proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a couple
years ago, we published some
may be useful for plant DNA alternativebarcoding. genes that
And so I did a little case study
So I looked at one of these loci, one of these genes, RPOC1.
I hope you can read this. Our unknown is in blue, and
according to the DNA, if we just
similarities, that gene tells us kind of look at DNA sequence
Out of 250,000 possible flowering plants, this gene,
this tiny little 500-base pair
down to three. snippet has narrowed my choices
vanilla claviculata, or vanilla It's eithedilloniana.arbellata,
Those are Caribbean leafless
So I'm in the right ballpark, and those are possible
candidates. But the DNA sequence is
identical from my unknown and those three species.
So that gene alone isn't going
answer. What about this gene, RPOB?
Well, in this case, I've
just two possibilities. It's either vanilla dilloniana
or vanilla barbellata.
grow in south Florida so I have Rfaith that this is probably att
least in the right ballpark.
PSBA to turn H spacer, actually gives us a pretty definitive
answer. The best match of my blue
unknown here is with the two
that I've sampled and nothing accessions ofelse.lla dilloniana
So with just a tiny little
plant specimen, I can put a name snippet of DNA and an unknown
So I actually feel confident in orelabeling my collection ass.
vanilla dilloniana, and I think DNA barcoding has great
potential in this particular
I'll just close with two other aspect.
Despite the fact that we love vanilla ice cream and it's the
world's most popular orchid in
plants are under great threat of flavor and fragrance, these
These are just three native species in Florida, and, as you
can see here, they are either listed as endangered or in some
cases they've even been extirpated.
They're extinct now in some parts of the wild.
These plants are difficult to cultivate because they're large,
massive vines.
when it comes to orchid Aconservation, in favor of thed
more showy, beautiful flowers.
the next generation that when they're enjoying their vanilla
ice cream that this flavor comes
deserve to be protected and so from an orchid and orchids
headway. forth, we can make great
[LAUGHTER] My book is on sale.
to sign. I do have copies I'm willing
of just $30. And for you, the low, low price
tidbits of information in there. There's lots of interesting
conclusion, I hope I've convinced you that there's
nothing plain about vanilla.
time. Thank you[APPLAUSE] for your
Now, before we do ice cream tasting, I'm assuming
there may be some questions. Do we have time?