Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi. I would like to see if smoke from the recent California fires will affect plants. The local wineries have said that their grapes flavor will be changed. So I was thinking about exposing some grapevine leaves to wood fire (and maybe another set to car exhaust). I will need to design some kind of chamber in the backyard for this. Then I would do a paper chromatography test. Is this the right test to look for any affect to the plant? I know chromatography will show the colors in the leaf, and I am not sure air pollution will affect this. If this won't work what would be a way to test the effect of smoke on grape leaves? I like this experiment because it might be useful information and my 8th grade teacher wants a high school level experiment. Thank you!
j.miles
p.s. For another idea I was also thinking about calculating the carbon footprints of all the schools and city hall in my town. But they might not let me graduate!

Hi jmiles!

Welcome to Science Buddies. This is a really interesting question, and although I don't have the answer, we will certainly try and help you with it.

With regards to the local wineries stating that the flavor of the grapes will be changed by the smoke from the recent California wild fires: do you know where this statement was made and by whom? If you are able to locate the origin of that statement, this may provide an avenue of enquiry for you. I would think that the best person to answer the question of the effects of smoke on grapes would be someone in the industry - so you might want to start there.

A quick search of the internet (I just used Google, but you should try some others, too) using the keywords "Grape Flavor," "California Fires" and "Smoke" turned up quite a few articles on the subject. One that caught my eye actually contained some chemistry (very surprising for some news articles!), which would allow for some more research. According to the article, a chemical compound present in the smoke becomes concentrated in the skins of the grapes (as opposed to the leaves).

http://news.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic ... 00318/1090

So, this would be where you would probably want to focus your attention, rather than the leaves. Unfortunately, I have no idea as to whether paper chromatography would be able to separate and visualize the compound in question, but hopefully some more searching will allow you to determine if this is feasible. Similarly, I would also suggest that you look into techniques that might work for the analysis of grapes, rather than the analysis of leaves...

Once you have been able to track down some of that information, we should be able to help you come up with some sort of experimental design. However, please keep in mind that this may not be a particularly "quick" experiment.

This sounds like an excellent and fascinating topic. Good luck, and please let us know if you have any questions.

Geoff.

Just to add to Geoff's excellent advice, since you're worried about a change in the flavor you might consider doing some sort of a grape taste-test after you've exposed them to the pollution and see if people can actually tell the difference and which grapes they like the least if they can.