Spurred on by reading Flower Confidential a while back (and being connected, at least loosely, to the floriculture industry), I’ve been tracking the quest to create a naturally blue-colored rose through genetic engineering.
Think back to biology class and recall that all organisms — from flowers to frogs, humus to humans — are built from a blueprint of DNA that describes their every characteristic. DNA describes how to build everything from flower color to a human’s height and does so with a very simple palette: all genes are expressed by a combination of just four bases, or essentially just four basic instructions. Think of genes as mini programs containing the code to perform a certain function. The concept is the same as with computer programming where the same small number of instructions can be combined in different ways to produce a Web site, Microsoft Excel or World of Warcraft.
Back to the blue rose… Roses are not naturally blue because they lack a gene to code for a blue pigmentation. A common “blue gene” for flowers is delphinidin which, among other flowers, colors petunias. Roses do, obviously, contain a gene to create red pigmentation which is another challange to creating a real blue-colored rose.
The Japanese company Suntory has been working on a genetically engineered blue rose for many years. Starting by splicing in delphinidin from petunias, they produced a deep purple rose. From there, the gene for red pigmentation was suppressed resulting in a kind of bluish-lavender color. It’s not quite the pure blue but it’s a start and the company recently announced that the first crop would go on sale in 2009.
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