Taste-Maker Allylix Prepares to Make “Nootkatone” a Household Word, as San Diego Gains Momentum in Industrial Biotechnology
terpenes in minute quantities for a variety of functions, and when I talked recently with Allylix CEO Carolyn Fritz, I got a 30-minute lessen in plant biology that was just a taste of what the company is up to.
One of the cool things she told me is that plants typically evoke terpenes in response to an environmental condition of some kind. So when insects attack a plant—a pine tree, for example—the tree responds to the attack by exuding a flypaper-sticky terpene resin. (This resin can be distilled to make turpentine.) Other types of terpenes are highly valued for other characteristics. Fritz says a geranium flower evokes a terpene that is actually a rose scent, to attract insects that will pollinate it. Terpenes also can be anti-viral and anti-fungal. Steroids are terpenes. Carotenoids are terpenes. Other terpenes are cytotoxins, which make them valuable in treating cancer.
Pine Tree resin
Altogether, Fritz said terpenes comprise a huge class of molecules that include hundreds of thousands of compounds. As a result, terpenes have significant commercial value to the industries focused on pharmaceuticals, insect repellants, and flavors and fragrances.
“From a commercial perspective, they are very interesting,” Fritz says. “They are also chemically very complex, and very hard to make.”
As an example, Fritz says trying to chemically synthesize a specific terpene would typically yield equal amounts of four seemingly identical “twin” compounds with fundamentally
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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