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This Mother's Day, thousands of roses will be given to moms around the country. But as this ScienCentral News video reports, scientists are working on creating a blue rose—and making other discoveries in the process.
A Rose By Any Other Color
Roses are red, violets are blue…this well-known verse might have to be reassessed, as science gets closer to creating a true blue rose.
Right now, roses can be grown in lots of different shades, including pink, yellow, peach, and even green. But blue roses can only be created artificially; one way is to fresh cut flowers and put their stems in blue-colored water. This is not permanent, and doesn't create a true blue rose. "I know that breeders have been trying to produce one for a long time," says Jaime Hayes, a designer at Surroundings Flowers in New York City. "I've seen it referred to as the 'Holy Grail' of rose colors for breeders—that eternal quest."
Enter genetic engineering—and a little serendipity. Fred Guengerich, professor of biochemistry and director of the Vanderbilt University Center in Molecular Toxicology, never intended to join the quest to create blue roses. His main interest is in understanding how chemicals become toxic to people. His team was studying how drugs metabolize in the liver, and they genetically engineered bacteria to produce a human liver enzyme, called cytochrome P450 2A6, which is involved in the metabolism of drugs in the body. To Guengerich's surprise, "the bacteria unexpectedly turned blue when they were growing under the conditions that one normally grows bacteria," he says.
This rose has been digitally altered.
A member of his team, knowing about the quest for the blue rose, wondered if this phenomenon could lead to a more efficient method than some of the previous, somewhat unsuccessful ways to create blue plants—taking genes from naturally blue flowers and putting them in non-blue ones. So the researchers tried inserting that liver gene into plants to see if they could create transgenic plants that would be permanently blue. So far, they've encountered a few problems. "If you move genes directly into plants, what'll happen is that you'll get blue spots in the stems," explains Guengerich. "One has to go on and try some specific targeting methods to get the color into the flowers as opposed to the stems. So that's one of the obstacles and we're still working on it, we're still working on overcoming that." Guengerich says it would work similarly to the way gene therapy works in humans.
Guengerich says this research could lead to things like engineering cotton to grow blue, which would save the trouble of having to dye blue jeans. He is also manipulating bacteria to turn other colors, and finding that these colorful chemicals might have potential as drugs with anti-cancer and anti-Alzheimer's properties, something closer to his own field of interest. "Of course I think we can live without blue flowers," he says. "On the other hand, this is really what we'd call serendipitous, that one can discover, potentially, new drugs by going through this route, and by following these compounds. This is what's always exciting about science, is that we can find new things that we don't expect."
Guengerich says this research could lead to things like engineering cotton to grow blue, which would save the trouble of having to dye blue jeans. He is also manipulating bacteria to turn other colors, and finding that these colorful chemicals might have potential as drugs with anti-cancer and anti-Alzheimer's properties, something closer to his own field of interest. "Of course I think we can live without blue flowers," he says. "On the other hand, this is really what we'd call serendipitous, that one can discover, potentially, new drugs by going through this route, and by following these compounds. This is what's always exciting about science, is that we can find new things that we don't expect."
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