New publication!
The optical physics of structural colour, within the tree
of life has been studied for centuries. Hooke and
Newton were familiar with the concept and understood
that this beautiful phenomenon quite distinct from the
way pigments work. Most people have encountered
structural colour in nature, in the feathers of a peacock
or the iridescent wings of the Blue Morpho or in many
other plants and animals. Surprisingly, in the genomics
era of high throughput sequencing and computational
analysis, very little is known about the genes involved.
Colonies of highly aligned and organised bacteria,
including many Flavobacteria, collectively display
brilliant structural colours. Bacteria were used in the
first large scale genomics study of structural colour, in
which Hoekmine was involved, which has just been
published in the Proceedings of the National Acadamy
of Science, USA (DOI 10.1073/pnas.2309757121).
There were many surprises; structural colour exists
in more than one bacterial phylum but there are predictable
genes and pathways involved. This work opens up
the possibilities of functional and evolutionary studies
on structural colour, and even the design and creation
of sustainable biomaterials.