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posted by martyb on Sunday April 11 2021, @06:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the blue-goo dept.

Natural brilliant blue food coloring wrung out of red cabbage:

For decades, concerns have been raised about the safety of synthetic food dyes, and while the evidence against them is still unclear, natural colorings are generally preferred. Most of these pigments are sourced from plants, although a few come from crushed insects. But frustratingly, not all colors are easy to find in these places.

"Blue colors are really quite rare in nature – a lot of them are really reds and purples," says Pamela Denish, an author of the new study.

[...] As you might expect, most of the anthocyanins in red cabbage are red or purple, but there are tiny amounts of blue in there too. After about a decade of trying, a team of scientists from a range of institutions and food companies has now managed to extract useful amounts of blue by converting other anthocyanins.

Doing so required exactly the right enzyme, so the team screened a library of millions of them, and used computational simulations to explore about 100 quintillion potential protein sequences. Eventually, they were able to design the perfect enzyme for the job of converting the red and purple anthocyanins into blue ones.

The end result, the team says, is a natural cyan dye equivalent to the widely used synthetic FD&C Blue No. 1.

Journal Reference:
Pamela R. Denish, Julie-Anne Fenger, Randall Powers, et al. Discovery of a natural cyan blue: A unique food-sourced anthocyanin could replace synthetic brilliant blue [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe7871)


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:06PM (15 children)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:06PM (#1136095) Homepage Journal

    It's supposed to be good because it's natural?
    Cyanide is natural too. It's produced by cassavas.

    Well, technically, it contains cyanogenic glycosides, which can release cyanide in the body when consumed [healthline.com]

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:10PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:10PM (#1136098)

    Why didn't they just use horseshoe crab blood?

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 12 2021, @12:13AM (2 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 12 2021, @12:13AM (#1136181) Journal

      The same reason they don't use the most common blood for reds - the color is not stable for long enough.
      You may want to suggest hydrated copper sulfate.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @12:23AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @12:23AM (#1136190)

        》The same reason they don't use the most common blood for reds - the color is not stable

        Thank you for that, Count, but the actual reason is that humans don't like blood as much as your kind does.

  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:20PM (1 child)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:20PM (#1136102)

    Don't forget what you can get out of castor beans [cdc.gov].

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Sunday April 11 2021, @08:34PM (3 children)

    by Beryllium Sphere (r) (5062) on Sunday April 11 2021, @08:34PM (#1136113)

    Thank you. I came in to post that.

    Plants are full of poisons to stop themselves from being eaten. Even plants we think of as edible are sometimes only giving sub-toxic doses. The only reason to prefer natural molecules is the chance that we've evolved to detoxify them.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @01:02AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @01:02AM (#1136205)

      The answer is easy, marketing. "Natural" is one of those words that sells really well. Even if it doesn't actually mean anything in that context, people import all sorts of secondary meanings on it. Just look at how well "ban dihydrogen monoxide" does in polls, the inability for people to describe what "organic food" is when asked, or calling everything bad "chemicals." All of that is just from the effort to separate people who don't want to think about these things from their money.

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday April 12 2021, @12:58PM (1 child)

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 12 2021, @12:58PM (#1136345) Homepage Journal

      Some of those plants we eat because of their poisons. I'm thinking of hot peppers.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @03:15PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @03:15PM (#1136440)

        Also broccoli

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 11 2021, @08:35PM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 11 2021, @08:35PM (#1136115) Journal

    Thank you. My first thought was "natural isn't always good". Rattlesnake venom is all natural, but I don't want a dose of it. Of course, if they have to squeeze 30 pounds of cabbage to get enough of the stuff to color my serving of - yogurt, I guess? Then it's still not "natural". The stuff may kill me, and God will readily tell me that he measured the stuff to be good, if you only eat a few ounces of cabbage at a time.

    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday April 12 2021, @01:58AM (3 children)

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Monday April 12 2021, @01:58AM (#1136222) Journal

      Rattlesnake venom is all natural, but I don't want a dose of it.

      Don't be so hasty [time.com]

      --
      La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday April 12 2021, @01:04PM (2 children)

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 12 2021, @01:04PM (#1136347) Homepage Journal

        Poisons, natural or not, are often used to treat cancer. The idea is to find a poison that the patient's cancer is slightly more sensitive to than the patients non-cancerous tissues. Then you poison him to within an inch of his life, keeping him on life support so he doesn't die, but the cancer does.

        If one poison doesn't do the trick (cancer not more sensitive than body cells), another might.

        • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday April 12 2021, @06:05PM (1 child)

          by fustakrakich (6150) on Monday April 12 2021, @06:05PM (#1136568) Journal

          I believe anti-venom is the most common use of snake poison. The cancer treatment is still theoretical.

          --
          La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
          • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 13 2021, @03:50AM

            by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 13 2021, @03:50AM (#1136834) Homepage Journal

            Not sure about this particular venom, but my wife was a doctor who among other thing treated cancer patients with a variety of poisons -- occasionally one was snake-derived.

            Too bad I can no longer ask her for the details.

            -- hendrik