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Ever wondered why blueberries are blue?
If youve ever been demolishing some fruit and wondered why blueberries are their distinctive color, then you might be interested in a new study from the University of Bristol.�
Rox Middleton, from Bristols School of Biological Sciences, hopped to uncover why blueberries are blue despite the red pigment in their skin. Her findings were published today in Science Advances.�
Why are blueberries blue?
Blueberries are as they are described because of a layer of wax that surrounds the fruit. This second skin is made from miniature structures that scatter both blue and UV light, resulting in blue coloring. The same could be said of damsons, sloes, and juniper berries.
“The blue of blueberries can’t be ‘extracted’ by squishing — because it isn’t located in the pigmented juice that can be squeezed from the fruit. That was why we knew that there must be something strange about the colour, Rox explained. “So we removed the wax and re-crystallised it on card and in doing so we were able to create a brand new blue-UV coating.”
She added: “It shows that nature has evolved to use a really neat trick, an ultrathin layer for an important colorant.
What does this mean?
The new research has once again indicated how we humans can learn from Mother Nature. The University of Bristol team now hopes to discover a way of recreating the coating and applying it to other things.�
In turn, this could lead to sustainable, biocompatible, and edible UV and blue-reflective paint!
Rox explained: It was really interesting to find that there was an unknown coloration mechanism right under our noses, on popular fruits that we grow and eat all the time.
“It was even more exciting to be able to reproduce that colour by harvesting the wax to make a new blue coating that no-one’s seen before.Building all that functionality of this natural wax into artificially engineered materials is the dream!”
