Article: True blue; molecules stack up to color flowers. (Cover Story)

Last year, at a memorial lecture honoring one of Japan's premiere organic chemists, organizers filled the stage with a popular blue flower called ajisai, better known in the United States as Hydrangea. For decades, Toshio Goto and his colleagues at Nagoya University in Japan had inched toward resolving a long-standing controversy about the source of the intense blues in flowers. He died just as his group had obtained its most convincing data, but Goto's ideas helped generate a new sense of how nature creates such a vivid color.

The controversy dates back to 1913, when a German researcher, Richard Will-statter, proposed that a single pigment made roses red and ...

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