Japanese researchers have developed a blue rose.
In 1840 botanical societies in Britain and Belgium offered a prize of half a million francs to the first breeder to produce a blue rose. Over a century and a half later, researchers at the Suntory Institute for Plant Science in Kyoto announced that they had finally met that challenge.
What floriculturalists in the 19th century didn’t know was that they were trying to tackle an impossible task, as roses are genetically incapable of producing blue pigmentation. However, the impossible became feasible in the early 1980s with the advent of the genetic engineering of plants.
The Australian company Florigene began working on the problem in the late 1980s, and Japanese beverage maker Suntory contributed funding and a group of scientists they had assembled to improve the quality of grapes and barley for their products. Using the latest techniques in genetic engineering, the team was able to turn off the gene that produces red pigment in roses, and introduce a blue producing gene from pansies.
Twelve years of trial and error and considerable investment seems like a lot to go through for a blue flower, but the technology developed through the project can be applied to other uses, such as making crops immune to diseases. The blue roses are expected to hit the market in Japan in the spring of 2009, just in time for Valentine’s Day.