Natural blues: structure meets function in plant natural products

花青素是一种可溶于水的植物天然色素，可产生许多水果和花卉熟悉的颜色。它们作为从橙色到红色、紫色到蓝色的天然食用着色剂具有巨大的潜力。蝴蝶豌豆(Clitoria Ternatea)通过高度装饰的飞燕草花青素使花朵呈现强烈的蓝色。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，代表了蓝色自然颜色的新来源。蝴蝶豌豆的花色苷在溶液中即使在室温下也具有显著的稳定性，但在不同的环境条件下，提取液中的花色苷代表了一系列具有不同化学装饰和不同功能的中间体，其颜色、颜色和稳定性不同。该项目将包括从蝴蝶豌豆花中提纯不同的花色苷，表征其功能特性，并将其与最先进的天然产物分析确定的结构相关联；高分辨率核磁共振光谱、分子动力学模拟和圆二色谱

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