These tiny berries are brighter than any other known natural material. Pic: Silvia Vignolni; PNAS
Update by news editor
19-09-2012
World’s shiniest living thing
The tiny African berry with a lot of
sparkle
Scientists have revealed the world's shiniest living thing.
It's a tiny berry that is the fruit of an African plant called
Pollia condensate.The berry is metallic blue and brighter
than any other known natural material.
The berries grow on a metre-tall herb that is found in the
forests of central Africa. They look like lots of small Christmas
baubles, clustered together on a leaf.
Researchers from Cambridge University took a closer look at the
fruit under a microscope to try to uncover the secret to its
shine.
What they found out was that the berries have very unusual tiny
spirals inside them that reflect light. The spirals create a blue
colour with a rainbow shimmer of other colours on top.
Do you think they look tasty? They're not! The berries don't
taste nice and they are not very nutritious. You wouldn't want to
eat them.
But birds do, possibly because they mistake it for a blueberry.
Many birds also like to collect sparkly objects for their nests or
to attract mates.
This helps the plant because when the birds eat the berries, the
seeds inside pass through the bird unharmed and come out in its
poo, growing into new plants elsewhere in the forest. Scientists
think that this is why the Pollia condensate evolved to
produce the sparkly fruit.
Now that we know how these tiny berries create their shine we
might be able to use the same technique to make food colouring,
cosmetics or even security labels.
Click here to see an interactive slideshow of
some of the world's shiniest living things
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World’s shiniest living thing
Unique blue fruit's colour sparkles for
centuries
The obscure Pollia condensate plant that grows in the
forests of central Africa has hit on a fantastic way of making an
irresistible shiny signal to every bird in the neighbourhood.
The brightest thing in nature, the fruit of the herb uses a
special method of reflecting light in different wavelengths. This
is unusual as colourful effects in nature are normally produced by
pigments.
Just a few other plant and animal species, including the peacock
and the scarab beetle, use a similar technique.
Fruits are made of lots of microscopic cells. The walls of these
cells contain a substance called cellulose. The cellulose in the
cell walls of the Pollia condensate berries is arranged in
asymmetric spiral layers. These layers are able to reflect certain
wavelengths of light to produce a very bright, blue-based
shimmering sparkle.
The thickness of each of the layers determines which wavelength
of light is reflected. Some cells have thinner layers and reflect
blue, others have thicker layers and reflect green or red.
Scientists believe the plant evolved to produce such shiny
berries in order to attract birds, who like to eat and collect the
fruit. The berries have very little nutritional value, which is bad
for the birds but good for the plant - it doesn't need to waste any
of its energy to produce quality bird food!
Because of how it is created, the colour of the Pollia
condensata fruit does not fade. Samples of the berry that
have been kept in herb collections dating back to the
19th century are still as colourful and shiny as ones
grown today.
Click here to see an interactive slideshow of
some of the world's shiniest living things
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suggestions
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Watch us LIVE on Glow TV