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pollia-condensata-berries
The most intense color in the biological world belongs to a tiny African berry. Iridescent blue and metallic, it literally outshines any other plant or animal substance in the world.
The plant itself is called Pollia condensata, and researchers have now explained the material magic underlying its marvelous hues: layers of cells that refract light in a manner usually seen in butterfly wings and beetle shells.
"Structural colors come about not by pigments that absorb light, but the way transparent material is arranged on the surface of a substance," said physicist Ullrich Steiner of Cambridge University. "This fruit is one of the first known examples in plants. We compared it with some other structural colors, such as the morpho butterfly wing, which is often described as the strongest structural color. This is stronger."
On the following pages, Wired talks to Steiner about the findings, which were co-authored with fellow Cambridge physicist Silvia Vignolini and published Sept. 10 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Above:
Pollia condensata Berries
Pigments fade, but structural colors remain largely untouched by time. Berries used in the new study came from botanical garden specimens collected in 1974, "and this one here is as bright and shiny blue as it was 40 years ago," Steiner said. If nature is any guide, they'll last far longer than that. Structural colors are still vivid in the fossils of beetles that lived 50 million years ago.All images: Vignolini et al./PNAS
Citation: "Pointillist structural color in Pollia condensata fruit." By
Silvia Vignolini, Paula J. Rudall, Alice V. Rowland, Alison Reed, Edwige Moyroud, Robert B. Faden, Jeremy J. Baumberg, Beverley J. Glover, and Ullrich Steiner. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10 September 2012
