We Have Spent Millions of Dollars on Blue Roses

TL;DR

Roses lack blue pigment genes entirely, making a true blue rose biologically elusive despite decades of expensive genetic engineering attempts.

Key Points

• 1.Roses cannot naturally produce blue pigment. Less than 10% of flowering plants are blue; roses only produce white, pink, and red flavonoid pigments and never faced evolutionary pressure to develop blue.
• 2.Suntory spent over a decade engineering a blue rose, releasing APPLAUSE in 2004. By inserting petunia delphinidin genes and managing vacuole pH, they created a rose with visible blue pigment — but critics called it merely 'mauve,' not truly blue.
• 3.APPLAUSE was sold for ~$30 per stem in 2009, roughly ten times the price of a regular rose. Financial incentive partly drives Big Rose's pursuit, but human desire for novelty and the seemingly impossible also fuels the effort.
• 4.Chinese researchers in 2018 used bacteria-derived indigoidine pigment injected directly into rose petals. Blue patches appeared within 12 hours but only near injection sites, faded quickly, and didn't alter the rose's fundamental biology — essentially a high-tech dye job.
• 5.Science is effectively 0-2 on producing a true blue rose. Neither the Suntory nor the Chinese bacterial approach yielded a stable, fully blue flower, and the Chinese team has published no follow-up research since their 2018 announcement.