Monday, April 6, 2020

Creation Moment 4/7/2020 - Why can’t a rose be blue?

And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind... Genesis 1:12

"About eight species of rose occur naturally, and none of them are blue. For centuries, rose enthusiasts have been breeding new varieties of roses, but the lack of naturally occurring blue pigment in any rose was a frustration to rose growers.


Quite simply, a plant can only produce blue flowers if it has the genes—instructions ‘written’ on its DNA—for manufacturing a blue pigment, such as delphinidin.
And roses did not have those genes.

Obviously, production of a blue rose would have to await a method of introducing the genes for manufacturing delphinidin from another species of plant to the rose genome, and that process is not as simple as it sounds. It only became possible in the 1980s.

First, the genes that enable a plant to produce blue pigment had to be isolated from the tens of thousands of genes located on the chromosomes in the world’s blue-flowered plants. The successful company (a subsidiary of Japanese firm Suntory) eventually used petunias, with their over 30,000 kinds of genes. They chose a variety that bore a dark violet flower.

Next, the relevant genes had to be introduced to rose plants and tested to ensure they were not only expressed in mature plants, but also confined to the petals—we don’t want roses with blue leaves or stems. This testing takes a long time unless you use something like yeast cells for multiplication rather than adult rose plants grown from seed.


Eventually, after much secret work and the expenditure of three billion yen (c. $US 25 million) by Suntory, the London Telegraph could make the 2008 announcement: “World’s first blue roses after 20 years of research”.

God created the programming during Creation Week about 6,000 years ago. And not only petunias and roses, but the original (parent) kinds of every other living creature in the world.
The codes for such complex instructions do not just happen ‘naturally’, i.e. by themselves—the years of intelligent effort involved in this ‘dreamful project’ illustrate that."
CMI