Most popular Blue Flowers made with the power of science

The "blue" color that exists in nature is surprisingly unusual. Of course the day the weather is good the sky is blue and the sea is blue. But most plants and animals can not make blue pigment.

Beautifully colored peacock seems to be blue, but it is not because the feathers are blue. It is a color that is created by how it reflects light.

Of the 280,000 angiosperms around the world, only 10% or less of blue flowers are attached.

However, scientists who continued to think that engineering could exceed the constraints of nature produced finally a flower that could be said to be blue. Japanese scientists announced that they created "the blue hue chrysanthemum by genetic manipulation ~ for the first time in the world ."

Chrysanthemums, roses, carnations, and lilies are common angiosperms, but there are no blue varieties, and within the range of conventional multiplication techniques, blue flowers could not be created from any variety.

Usually, Mr. Noda and his colleagues had to express two genes related to blueing flowers from butterfly and spinach by genetic manipulation in order to make red and pink chrysanthemums blue. By doing this we could make the flower color blue spectrum. Studies have revealed that the resulting color is due to the chemical interaction inside the flower called "co-pigmentation" (mutual-pigmentation), researchers think it can use for other flowers make it blue as well.

Suntory, a Japanese company well-known for alcoholic beverages, has been thinking to engineer blue flowers for many years. After 20 years of research, in 2009 released the world's first "blue rose". But it looked like purple rather than blue. If you are an aesthetic eye, you should notice that this new "blue chrysanthemum" is like violets like lavender or eggplant.

"Blue chrysanthemum" made by genetic recombination.

Bio hacker Sebastian Cocioba, an artist who is trying to make his own blue roses, said that "their flowers are cool lavender even if they say it well", "calling me as blue is feeling a sense of incompatibility" It is. still, the Suntory rose "Applause" is the closest to the "genuine blue rose" for now.

The blue chrysanthemum is strictly a color that falls within the blue or blue purple classification of the British Royal Horticultural Society. Yet Suntory's chrysanthemum is a gift of genetic engineering. Chrysanthemum does not make a pigment that is a source of a blue coloration with a specific flower known as delphinidin -based anthocyanins (anthocyanin of delphinidin origin). Mr. Noda incorporated these pigments into the genome of chrysanthemum from butterfly and furin and urged them to develop.

Market demand for such laboratory products is significant. When Suntory 's blue roses made their debut in Japan, they sold at 10 times the price of ordinary roses. Chrysanthemum is the second most popular flower in the world after roses. Mr. Noda said that "blue flowers with strange genetically modified genes will greatly broaden the willingness to purchase flowers".

Nonetheless, scientists are frank about the fact that the flowers that they made are closer to purple than blue.

The mechanism by which blue flowers can be produced has been studied in detail and I know that there are multiple ways to make flowers blue. Mr. Noda's team took the "co-pigmentation" approach which I thought was most likely to be realized. As another method, we assumed that the flower cells can be destabilized by changing the pH value, but the flowers did not turn blue as expected by researchers. For that reason, research has written that "the flower's blue color may be deeper than it has been known to date."

After all, the blue color in nature may not be reproducible by human engineering.

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