Abstract: Passionflower (Passiflora incarnata) is breathtakingly beautiful. Out of curiosity, I started counting the number of flowers blossoming each day in a plant in the residence of the Director, IISER Mohali on April 21, 2014. I found the number to double every day for a few days and the flowering peaked and declined and this process continued until winter set in. Follow up investigations with the help of undergraduate students (and my wife, gardener, security staff and others) led to the discovery of synchronized pulsed flowering in Passionflower. An important discovery of a rare phenomenon! While a modified Lotka model could explain the temporal oscillations, the pattern of alternating violet and white color in the filaments was accounted for by an activator-inhibitor model of Gierer and Meinhardt. With the help of fellow chemists, the flavones, and anthocyanins present in the flower were identified by mass spectral and UV-vis spectral studies of the methanol extract.



References
1. S. Goyal, R. Reji, S. S. Tripathi and N. Sathyamurthy, Synchronous pulsed flowering in Passiflora incarnata, Current Science, 117, 1211-1216 (2019).
2. A. P. Bhati, S. Goyal, R. Yadav and N. Sathyamurthy, Pattern formation in Passiflora incarnata: An activator-inhibitor model, J. Biosci. 46: 84 (2021).
3. Y. Silori, S. Chawla, A. K. De, R. P. Shirke, J. Grover, S. S. V. Ramasastry and N. Sathyamurthy, Spectral characteristics of the flavones and anthocyanins present in passionflower (Passiflora incarnata), Photochem. Photobiol. xx, xxx (2024).