The color of food is critical to the food and beverage industries, as it influences many properties beyond eye-pleasing visuals including flavor, safety, and nutritional value. Blue is one of the rarest colors in nature’s food palette— especially a cyan blue—giving scientists few sources for natural blue food colorants. Finding a natural cyan blue dye equivalent to FD&C Blue No. 1 remains an industry-wide challenge and the subject of several research pro- grams worldwide. Computational simulations and large-array spectroscopic techniques were used to determine the 3D chemical structure, color expression, and stability of this previously uncharacterized cyan blue anthocyanin- based colorant. Synthetic biology and computational protein design tools were leveraged to develop an enzy- matic transformation of red cabbage anthocyanins into the desired anthocyanin. More broadly, this research demonstrates the power of a multidisciplinary strategy to solve a long-standing challenge in the food industry.
Discovery of a natural cyan blue: A unique food-sourced anthocyanin could replace synthetic brilliant blue
Grisanti, Luca;Laporte, Sara;Magistrato, Alessandra;Baroni, Stefano;
2021
Abstract
The color of food is critical to the food and beverage industries, as it influences many properties beyond eye-pleasing visuals including flavor, safety, and nutritional value. Blue is one of the rarest colors in nature’s food palette— especially a cyan blue—giving scientists few sources for natural blue food colorants. Finding a natural cyan blue dye equivalent to FD&C Blue No. 1 remains an industry-wide challenge and the subject of several research pro- grams worldwide. Computational simulations and large-array spectroscopic techniques were used to determine the 3D chemical structure, color expression, and stability of this previously uncharacterized cyan blue anthocyanin- based colorant. Synthetic biology and computational protein design tools were leveraged to develop an enzy- matic transformation of red cabbage anthocyanins into the desired anthocyanin. More broadly, this research demonstrates the power of a multidisciplinary strategy to solve a long-standing challenge in the food industry.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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