In a 1987 Nature paper, a team led by
plant geneticist Peter Meyer, then with the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, showed that inserting a maize gene into a petunia enabled it to produce the pigment pelargonidin and take on a salmon color.
Plant geneticist Peter Quail of the University of California, Berkeley, says the process is unexpectedly simple: There could easily have been a dozen regulators between cryptochromes and COP1, he says.