Each pigment consists of several building blocks, which form a skeleton that can actually be taken apart and put together again in various combinations. Around 300 antocyans have been identified in plants, all of them based on about 20 different building blocks. A typical antocyan contains two to four such blocks. This concept has given the chemists in Bergen, who are regarded as world leaders in isolating and identifying natural pigments, ideas for other applications. Since a plant cannot move around, it has to look after its own interests in other ways.
Ordinary plants have about ten times as many connections with their environment as animals.
Chemical communication is a basic concept in Moksheim Andersen s way of thinking. Many fruits and berries increase their production of pigments as they ripen. Their bright colours attract birds, for example, which help to spread their seeds over a wide area. Many people believe, quite wrongly, that the leaves of many plants redden in the autumn simply because their chlorophyll breaks down. But the colour change is also due to the production of red pigment in the leaves, and we don t really know why this happens.