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The secret to this fruit’s mysterious blue color | Science | AAAS
With their dazzling metallic hue, the blue fruits of the laurustinus shrub (Viburnum tinus), a flowering plant popular in gardens across Europe, are a sight to behold. But it’s what lies beneath the surface that’s caught the attention of scientists in a new study.
Researchers viewed samples of the fruit tissue through an electron microscope to examine their internal structure. They found no blue pigment as is typical in other blue fruits such as blueberries—just layers and layers of blobs. These blobs turned out to be tiny droplets of fat, arranged in a manner that reflects blue light—a phenomenon known as “structural color”—the team reports today in Current Biology.
Below the fat droplets lies another layer of dark red pigment, which absorbs any other wavelengths of light and intensifies the blue shade. The team verified these findings using computer simulations, confirming that this type of structure can indeed produce the precise shade of blue seen in the laurustinus.
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I've been captivated by plants that produce blue colored flowers. I have 2 species of Hydrangea in my yard. Hydrangea can have flowers that range from white to pink but mine are a deep blue. The secret? I feed the young plants with aluminum sulfate. The sulfate makes the soil acidic while the aluminum gets bound in a cage of plant phenolic compounds that absorbs red sunlight & reflects only the blue color.
This plant described in this article uses a very different mechanism but its blue is strikingly beautiful.
With their dazzling metallic hue, the blue fruits of the laurustinus shrub (Viburnum tinus), a flowering plant popular in gardens across Europe, are a sight to behold. But it’s what lies beneath the surface that’s caught the attention of scientists in a new study.
Researchers viewed samples of the fruit tissue through an electron microscope to examine their internal structure. They found no blue pigment as is typical in other blue fruits such as blueberries—just layers and layers of blobs. These blobs turned out to be tiny droplets of fat, arranged in a manner that reflects blue light—a phenomenon known as “structural color”—the team reports today in Current Biology.
Below the fat droplets lies another layer of dark red pigment, which absorbs any other wavelengths of light and intensifies the blue shade. The team verified these findings using computer simulations, confirming that this type of structure can indeed produce the precise shade of blue seen in the laurustinus.
==========================================================================================
I've been captivated by plants that produce blue colored flowers. I have 2 species of Hydrangea in my yard. Hydrangea can have flowers that range from white to pink but mine are a deep blue. The secret? I feed the young plants with aluminum sulfate. The sulfate makes the soil acidic while the aluminum gets bound in a cage of plant phenolic compounds that absorbs red sunlight & reflects only the blue color.
This plant described in this article uses a very different mechanism but its blue is strikingly beautiful.
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