Durian is a Southeast Asian tropical plant known for its hefty, spine-covered fruit and sulfury and onion-like odor. The edible part of the fruit, a yellowish pulp, consists of the arils encasing the seeds. The pulp exhibits a sweet taste and a pleasant custard-like consistency.

Its odour, which combines some fruitiness with a dominating sulfury note, however, is extremely strong and, from the point of view of Westerners not used to durian consumption, very extraordinary and rather repellent. “We had already shown that the fruit’s stench is essentially due to the odorant ethanethiol and its derivatives,” said study authors Dr Nadine Fischer and Dr Martin Steinhaus.