Fruit Skin Has Bright Blue Pointillist Appearance

Biological Strategy

AskNature Team

Modify Light/Color

Color in living systems comes from pigments and the interaction of light with surfaces. Color serves many purposes for living systems, such as attracting prey or mates, providing warnings, or protecting through camouflage. To create the effects needed for each purpose, living systems must control the expression or visibility of pigments and the interactions (such as reflectance and refraction) of light. To do so, they have strategies that modify color or light to increase or decrease the color’s position, intensity, opacity, and more. Male hummingbirds, for example, have brightly colored feather patches on their throats; the coloring comes from pigments, structures that refract light, or a combination of the two. When a male hummingbird hovers near a potential mate, it modifies the angle of these feathers to create a bright, colorful display. However, when it needs to mute the colors to reduce conspicuousness, such as to avoid a predator, it modifies the angle again.

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Send Light Signals in the Visible Spectrum

The visible spectrum is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can detect. Visible light can be thought of in two ways–light as illumination (such as that used by fireflies) and colors that result from light being absorbed or reflected. Living systems use light for a variety of purposes. Sometimes, they use it to make themselves highly visible (like a peacock showing off his brilliant feathers to a potential mate). Other times, they use it to become virtually invisible (like an owl hiding in plain sight when it rests during the day). When a living system sends a light signal, it must create that light or color in an energy- and material-efficient way. Living systems create and enhance color using such strategies as non-toxic pigments, structures that bend and absorb different wavelengths, and chemical processes that create bioluminescence.

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Flowering Plants

Clade Angiosperms (“receptacle seed”): Dandelions, oaks, grasses, cacti, apples

With 416 families containing some 300,000 known species, angiosperms are the most diverse group of plants, and they can be found around the globe in a wide variety of habitats. They are characterized by seeds that grow enclosed in ovaries, which are enclosed in flowers. The floral organs then develop into fruits of myriad kinds and dimensions, from simple seed casings on maples to elaborate fleshy growths like papayas. The oldest flower known from fossils, Montsechia vidalii, appeared during the Jurassic Period 130 million years ago. They are the primary food source for herbivorous animals, which in turn makes them the indirect food source for carnivores as well.

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The skin of the marble berry has a bright blue pointillist appearance due to distinct cell-to-cell Bragg reflection of color on cellulose microfibrils.

Image: Furiouslettuce /

Bragg diffraction. Two beams with identical wavelength and phase approach a crystalline solid and are scattered off two different atoms within it. The lower beam traverses an extra length of 2dsin?. Constructive interference occurs when this length is equal to an integer multiple of the wavelength of the radiation.

Image: Tanzania Plant Collaboration /

Image: Furiouslettuce /

“Biological communication by means of structural color has existed for at least 500 million years. Structural color is commonly observed in the animal kingdom, but has been little studied in plants. We present a striking example of multilayer-based strong iridescent coloration in plants, in the fruit of Pollia condensata. The color is caused by Bragg reflection of helicoidally stacked microfibrils that form multilayers in the cell walls of the epicarp. We demonstrate that animals and plants have convergently evolved multilayer-based photonic structures to generate colors using entirely distinct materials. The bright blue coloration of this fruit is more intense than that of any previously described biological material. Uniquely in nature, the reflected color differs from cell to cell, as the layer thicknesses in the multilayer stack vary, giving the fruit a striking pixelated or pointillist appearance. Because the multilayers form with both helicoidicities, optical characterization reveals that the reflected light from every epidermal cell is polarized circularly either to the left or to the right, a feature that has never previously been observed in a single tissue.” (Vignolini 2012: 15712)

Bragg Diffraction Planes. Two beams with identical wavelength and phase approach a crystalline solid and are scattered off two different atoms within it. The lower beam traverses an extra length of 2dsinθ. Constructive interference occurs when this length is equal to an integer multiple of the wavelength of the radiation.

Supporting information showing the mechanism can be downloaded from PNAS.

Last Updated August 18, 2016

References

Journal article

Pointillist structural color in Pollia fruit

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 11/09/2012 | S. Vignolini, P. J. Rudall, A. V. Rowland, A. Reed, E. Moyroud, R. B. Faden, J. J. Baumberg, B. J. Glover, U. Steiner

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