Natural Blue Roses May Be Within Reach

May 7, 2004 — -- Giving mom a rose for Mother's Day? Thanks to an enzyme found in human liver, it might soon be possible to present her with the flower industry's Holy Grail: A blue rose.

Roses already come in an endless array of colors from pink to yellow to peach to red to striped. But, despite more than 15 years of trying, no one has been able to create a natural blue rose.

In the $1.2-billion-a-year global rose business, achieving what would be a truly unique bloom would mean instant profits.

"A lot of wealthy people are rose fans and anything unique sells for high prices," says Robert Skirvin, a hortoculturalist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "There's quite a market."

Now a surprise finding in a medical lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., may have finally placed the blue rose within reach.

But just what makes the flower so unattainable? Apparently in nature, blue is a very complicated hue.

The rare blue color in petunias, for example, relies on a mix of genetic and environmental cues. There's the pigment called delphinidin that creates the color, then there are co-pigments, required to bring out the blue tint.

Finally, just the right balance of acidity is needed inside the cells of the plant to ensure the right shade of blue is expressed.

The rose, in its current versions, lacks all three.

"The rose is not easy to work with," says David Byrne, a rose geneticist at Texas A&M University in College Station. "It has no blue pigments and it can't seem to go through the transformation process."