The Garden of Medicinal Plants,KPU

Family name index
　Please cite the URL of this page when you use the photographs from the database. If you use photographs from the database in a public work or you have any queris, please contact us in advance.

Welcome to the Floral Fluorescence Database.

　Pollen and/or anther of a number of plant flowers show blue fluoresccence under UV light. Major colour of fluorescence is blue although some pollens and/or anthers show green or yellow fluorescence. H. Fukui, Professor emeritus of Kagawa University, took many photographs of flowers under UV light. This site provides photographs of about 580 plants. Several photographs taken by S. Mori are also included. You can comprehensively search plants by its scientific name and Japanese name from upper box. Familial classification of plants is based on APG III (2009). Almost all of the photographs were taken with a digital single lens reflex camera "Nikon D300" under a fluorescent light and a black light (UV 365 nm) in the darkroom.

　Why do many pollens and/or anthers emit fluorescence? Anthers usually extend beyond the corolla, and genes in pollen are exposed to the risk of damage from solar UV irradiation. Fluorescent compounds may protect genes in pollen from the UV light through emission of heat and fluorescence. Another role of fluorescence from pollen and anther may be attracting insects as pollinators, while, for insects, the fluorescence may be a marker of food, assuming that insects can recognize such fluorescence. We are studying the property of fluorescent compounds and the behaviour of insects to confirm the above hypothesis.

Mushinome
Hiroshi Fukui¹, Nobuhiro Hirai², Shinnosuke Mori², Katsumi Goto³, Junji Toyoda⁴, and Junko Tsukioka³
(¹Professor Emeritus of Kagawa University, ²Graduate Schoool of Agriculture, Kyoto University, ³The Garden of Medicinal Plants, Kyoto Pharmaceutical Univeristy, ⁴Creative Office Yutaka)


　Biography of Hiroshi Fukui Ph.D. (1941-2013)
　1941　Born in Kyoto
　1970　Assistant Professor, Kyoto University
　1971　Ph.D., Kyoto University
　1978　Associate Professor, Kyoto University
　1991　Professor, Kagawa University
　2007　Professor Emeritus of Kagawa University