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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)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @08:58PM (5 children)
I thought everyone knew that red cabbage had a blue color. Perhabs I'm the only one who do the dished by hand and soak the pot used for red cabbage. Perhabs I should report my everyday life to scientists ;)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @09:13PM
washing dishes by hand, it will never catch on, repeatability is out the window.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sensei_moreh on Sunday April 11 2021, @11:00PM (1 child)
Red cabbage was my go to alternative to litmus paper when the latter is unavailable and I need an indicator to distinguish acidic solutions from basic solutions.
Geology - It's not rocket science; it's rock science
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @12:19AM
Red cabbage? Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky.
(Score: 3, Informative) by KritonK on Monday April 12 2021, @08:44AM
Indeed. A few years ago, I thought I'd dye Easter eggs using natural ingredients. Looking it up, I found the following suggestions: onion skins for brown, turmeric for yellow, beets for red, and red cabbage for blue. Although red cabbage is purple, the eggs turned out a grayish blue.
(For those interested, onion skins and turmeric worked best, red cabbage produced a powdery coating that was easily scratched, and beets didn't work at all, as the color did not stick to the eggs.)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 13 2021, @03:52AM
The cones that detect blue in our eyes have a secondary sensitivity peak in the red part of the spectrum. Thus closing the so-called colour wheel.