14 DAY TRIAL // Roses are flowers with history.
Since Roman times, they became symbols. Red roses stand for passion, white roses represent purity.
Rose cultivators have been struggling for centuries to breed a blue rose, but the mechanism of the flowers' color proved more complex than they thought.
But the Australian based Florigene and the Japanese Suntory company, employing CSIRO's gene silencing technology, have managed to create the first blue rose ever.
Roses are known to be red, pink, orange or yellow, but all these are variants of the same gene. When the gene is silenced, we get white roses.
Some mauve roses have been achieved but they, too, were found to be generated by a variant of the gene for red pigment and not by the presence of blue pigment.
To get the world's first blue rose with blue pigment there were necessary three steps: silencing the red pigment, inserting a gene for blue pigment and produce the blue pigment.
The researchers focused on the dihydroflavonol reductase (DFR) gene, encoding the enzyme dihydroflavonol reductase (DFR) which initiates the pigment synthesis in flowers. In roses, the DFR gene produces the red pigment but roses lack a gene for blue pigment. The researchers turned off the gene for red pigment employing gene silencing.
Gene silencing, developed by CSIRO in 1997, has been of great use in researches for assessing gene function and in the development of experimental plant strains; but the blue rose could be its first commercial application.
To make roses produce blue pigment, the researchers inserted a gene named delphinidin from pansy. Finally, the researchers replaced the rose DFR gene with a DFR gene from an iris, excellent at favoring the blue pigment synthesis.
The first blue rose is in fact a pale violet color, but its color comes from blue pigment. Even bluer roses could be achieved if rose petals are made less acidic, as higher acidity inhibits the blue pigment.
Researchers are now looking for genes that shift petal acidity or change petal color in other ways, to achieve a bluer rose. Florigene has already bred blue carnations in Australia by employing gene technology since 1996. In 3 years, blue roses will be commercially available in Australia.