The staff at St. Croix Sensory no longer winces when a diaper evaluation is scheduled. Even the accountant passes by a fresh donation of cat urine, unphased. The nature of sensory testing requires a unique relationship with malodors and the sheer frequency and variety of unpleasant odors has dissolved any novelty it once held.
But, when the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory, located in St. Paul, MN announced the long-awaited bloom of “Horace” the corpse flower, St. Croix Sensory recognized a unique opportunity for odor exploration. After all, while we may be a little desensitized to malodors, there is nothing cavalier about the invitation to investigate the odor composition of a “corpse”.
St. Croix reached out to peers from Syft Technologies, manufacturer of the SIFT-MS (a form of direct mass spectrometry) which is central in St. Croix Sensory’s analytical testing capabilities to share the excitement of Horace’s impending bloom. Together the team developed a plan to analyze the curious odor compounds associated with the Corpse Flower.
With the permission of the team at Como, St. Croix Sensory staff collected ambient air odor samples in 1L Tedlar bags from the bud and stalk of the plant before and during the bloom timeline. The samples were immediately returned to the laboratory for analytical evaluation on St. Croix Sensory’s SIFT-MS.
To identify the prominent VOC compounds present in the samples, a full scan was run on the air sample collected from the inside the bloom itself. From that comprehensive data, seven key compounds were identified including ammonia and a range of sulfur compounds.
St. Croix Sensory President, Michael McGinley, and Syft’s Applications Team Lead, Leslie Silva, recently published a white paper of the corpse flower findings titled, “Real-Time Analysis of Ephemeral Odors from Horace, the Blooming Corpse Flower, by SIFT-MS”
These findings confirmed the SIFT-MS successfully analyzes a wide range of VOCs in real-time and can easily characterize odorous VOCs over a wide range of compound classes.