University of Wisconsin-Madison spin-off company Unifinium Ltd. enters an eighth holiday season with its Forest FreshTM product, which keeps needles of cut Christmas trees green and on the tree for up to six weeks. Sales of the proprietary mixture have increased about 10 percent annually since it was introduced in 1995.

Beginning in the 1960s, Forest Fresh”s inventor, UW-Madison entomology professor emeritus Dale Norris, conducted basic research on the responses of plant cells to stress. He found that plants produce genetically determined chemicals in different amounts, depending on the plant”s stress level.

Also, Norris found that he could mimic the stress response by adding appropriate antioxidants or oxidants to the plant”s water supply, foliage, or stem surface. The technology worked on more than 40 plant species including soybeans, corn, vegetable crops, houseplants, cut flowers, Christmas trees, and mature forest and shade trees.

In 1971, Norris published a hypothesis regarding antioxidant/oxidant, redox-based chemistry as a unifying mechanism by which an energy state is converted into the “information” that dictates a behavior within a living cell, between cells, or in multicellular organisms. Over the years he expanded his hypothesis to include such transductions (conversion of energy to information) involving viruses, microorganisms, animals (including humans), and plants.

During the last decade, the central role of redox exchange chemistry has become a major focus in life science research, according to Norris. The role of redox exchange chemistry in transducing energy states into specific orderly life-enabling behaviors allows researchers to determine the real-world roles of the millions of identified genes and proteins. And it keeps your Christmas tree”s needles off the floor.

Norris founded Unifinium in 1989 to commercialize products resulting from his research program. Unifinium”s products contain environmentally friendly, proprietary mixtures of antioxidants and/or oxidants. The products function primarily by altering the behavior, or slowing the cell death, of target organisms including insects, plants, and trees.

The company”s first product, Forest Fresh, targeted one of the nation”s most stressed plants, harvested Christmas trees. In 2000, Unifinium began marketing ETERNAL BLOOMTM to prolong the vase life of freshly cut flowers. The product extends the bloom of cut roses to about 14 days.

For more on Unifinium and/or its products, go here .