Natural blues: structure meets function in plant natural products

花青素是一种水溶性植物天然色素，产生许多水果和花朵所熟悉的颜色。作为从橙色到红色、紫色到蓝色的天然食用色素，它们具有巨大的潜力。蝶豆（Clitoria ternatea）的花是深蓝色的，由高度装饰的飞鸽属花青素组成。这种植物的花瓣被用来制作在亚洲国家很受欢迎的蓝茶，而花中的花青素作为一种传统食物，代表了蓝色天然颜色的新来源。蝶豆花青素在室温条件下具有良好的溶液稳定性，但其提取物中的花青素是一系列具有不同化学修饰和不同功能的中间体，在不同的环境条件下，其颜色、色度和稳定性也各不相同。该项目将包括从蝴蝶豌豆花中纯化不同的花青素，表征它们的功能特性，并将它们与最先进的天然产物分析所定义的结构联系起来；高分辨率核磁共振光谱，分子动力学模拟和圆二色性

Anthocyanins are water-soluble plant natural pigments producing the familiar colours of many fruits and flowers. They have enormous potential as natural food colourants from orange through red and purple to blue. The butterfly pea (Clitoria ternatea) makes intensely blue-coloured flowers pigmented by highly decorated delphinium-based anthocyanins. Petals of this plant are used to make blue tea, popular in Asian countries, and anthocyanins from flowers, as a traditional food, represent a new source of blue natural colours. Anthocyanins of butterfly pea have remarkable stability in solution even at room temperature However, the anthocyanins in extracts represent a range of intermediates with different chemical decorations and different functionalities in terms of their colour, shade and stability in different environmental conditions. The project will involve purifying the different anthocyanins from butterfly pea flowers, characterizing their functional properties and relating these to their structures to be defined by state-of-the-art natural product analyses; high resolution NMR spectroscopy, molecular dynamics simulations and circular dichroism