Damn you, agrobiodiversity. Every day something new. For example, did you know that a plant is behind the phrase “sardonic grin”? Well, apparently, the roots of the word “sardonic” go back to Homer, who adapted the ancient word for the Sardinians “because of the belief that the Punic people who settled Sardinia gave condemned men a potion that made them smile before dying”? That’s from an ANSA press release which goes on to describe some recent research which purports to nail down the active ingredient of the potion.
It turns out to be polyacetylenes from Oenanthe fistulosa, an umbel. They “cause facial muscles to contract and produce a grimace or rictus.” This species is not cultivated, I don’t think, but a congeneric is: O. javanica is used as a vegetable in parts of Asia. So O. fistulosa is a crop wild relative, sort of. Anyway, the ANSA release doesn’t give details of the paper, but I believe it might be a February article in Journal of Natural Products by a group of Italian and Polish researchers.
One of the authors, Mauro Ballero from the botany department of the Universita di Cagliari, which is in Sardinia, had this to say about the significance of the research, no doubt with a sardonic grin on his face:
The good news is that the molecule in this plant may be retooled by pharmaceutical companies to have the opposite effect.