Firms working on reproducing compounds without need for repeated harvesting but conservationists are sceptical

Many of the world’s most expensive perfumes begin with a wounded tree. When some Aquilaria trees are damaged, they produce a dark, fragrant resin that becomes agarwood, or oudh – an ingredient so valuable that wild trees have been illegally felled in its pursuit.

The result has devastated wild Aquilaria populations. But what if perfumers could create the smell without cutting down the tree?

With the help of AI, scientists are learning to predict how molecules that have never been made will smell, reconstructing scent-producing genes from flowers believed to be extinct. Others have collected microbes from clouds and used them as a starting point for new perfumes.

Now scientists and biotechnology companies say advances could soon allow the fragrance industry to reproduce scents and compounds from endangered plants without repeatedly harvesting them.

“Being able to recreate the scent of an endangered plant would be a huge win for both the environment but also the brands,” said Alex Wiltschko, the founder of Osmo, a Google Brain spin-off that has raised $130m to develop artificial intelligence capable of predicting and recreating smells.

Osmo has recreated the scent of a rare tree from a piece of bark “the size of a finger”, Wiltschko said. A spectrometer analysed the sample, its AI reconstructed the chemical formula and the scent was reproduced in its laboratory.

BioHarvest Sciences says it has created a stable cell culture from an endangered south-east Asian fragrance plant, allowing its valuable compounds to be produced without cultivating or harvesting the original plant.

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