Experimental induction of resins as a tool to understand variability in ambers
2021
Abstract. Amber is chiefly known as a preservational medium of
biological inclusions, but it is itself a chemofossil, comprised of
fossilised plant resin. The chemistry of today's resins has been long
investigated as a means of understanding the botanical sources of ambers.
However, little is known about the chemical variability of resins and
consequently about that of the ambers that are derived from particular resins.
We undertook experimental resin production in Araucariacean plants to
clarify how much natural resin variability is present in two species,
Agathis australis and Wollemia nobilis, and whether different resin exudation stimuli types can be chemically
identified and differentiated. The latter were tested on the plants, and the resin
exudates were collected and investigated with Fourier-transform infrared attenuated total reflection (FTIR-ATR) spectroscopy to give
an overview of their chemistry for comparisons, including multivariate
analyses. The Araucariacean resins tested did not show distinct chemical
signatures linked to a particular resin-inducing treatment. Nonetheless, we
did detect two separate groupings of the treatments for Agathis, in which the branch
removal treatment and mimicked insect-boring treatment-derived resin spectra
were more different from the resin spectra derived from other treatments. This
appears linked to the lower resin viscosities observed in the branch- and
insect-treatment-derived resins. However the resins, no matter the treatment, could
be distinguished from both species. The effect of genetic variation was also
considered using the same stimuli on both the seed-grown A. australis derived from
wild-collected populations and on clonally derived W. nobilis plants with natural
minimal genetic diversity. The variability in the resin chemistries
collected did reflect the genetic variability of the source plant. We
suggest that this natural variability needs to be taken into account when
testing resin and amber chemistries in the future.
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