Published 9:15 am Thursday, August 29, 2024
Blue lima beans could eventually make their way to grocery store shelves, if researcher Darren Abbey has anything to say about it.
Mostly for the novelty.
The St. Paul, Minn.-based researcher works by day as a clinical certifying scientist.
Separate from his day job, he also runs the blog “The Biologist Is In” and posts updates on social media about his Blue Bean Project.
Is he a particular fan of lima beans?
“Not terribly,” Abbey told the Capital Press.
Is blue his favorite color?
“It has come to be,” he said with a laugh.
How blue is blue?
The blue he’s gotten so far on a few beans is a sort of denim color. A separate line is a little bit brighter.
“With lima beans, I’m hoping for something that is brighter than that,” he said. “It’s hard to say exactly which tone of blue … something that is distinctly blue that you wouldn’t have to question or learn about it to think it’s blue.”
So, like electric blue or Smurf blue?
“Smurf blue would be great, or robin’s egg blue,” he said.
Would a blue lima bean taste different?
“I don’t expect it would,” he said. “The color in beans is just in the very surface of the seed. Most of the flavor is going to be in the meat of the bean. That said, every variety has the potential to taste its own way.”
When people ask how his beans taste, Abbey usually responds, “Well, they taste like beans.”
Abbey’s efforts aren’t in conjunction with any university, company or funding organization.
He has a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Minnesota, where he primarily worked with medically relevant yeast to address bloodstream infections.
“The closest I have to an agricultural background is, my entire life, my family had gardens,” he said “As soon as I got my own space, my own yard, I had gardens. Because of my science background, basically everything I grow in my gardens is a breeding project.”
In 2015, Abbey was randomly reading about pigments in beans “because that’s something I do.”
He realized the pigment in red beans is in the same family as some blue flowers.
“So I was like, ‘Well, OK, then why don’t we see blue dry beans around?’” he recalled.
There were a few so-called blue beans, but they were rare, available from Europe and more of a purple or gray color.
“They didn’t really have the blue color that appealed to me,” he said.
He tried ordering some of the European offerings.
“For a couple of years they seemed like a mirage, where I’d find someone selling or offering them, and then they would run out or have no contact,” he said.
He finally got several seeds of a rare hybrid that produced black seeds with a little blue in 2018 and grew them out. One plant produced a dark blue seed.
He also read published research about the particular pigment pathway, and realized he might be able to set up a cross to recreate the color in other beans.
“The first one was sort of grown on vibes and I had some fortunate luck, but I think I learned enough from it that I decided to try it again,” he said.
He’s trying to produce blue lima beans, runner beans and tepary beans, which are primarily produced in the Southwest.
“They’re all very different, but they’re all domesticated bean species,” he said.
Other beans tend to produce a brown pigment, which results in a dull appearance, but lima beans produce the brightest colors, Abbey said.
“Lima beans are where my largest hopes lie,” he said.
Abbey had to find varieties with the necessary genetics to make a blue bean possible.
“If everything goes my way, if I’m lucky in all ways, the earliest I could see a blue seed would be two years,” he said. “If I’m not so lucky, it will take longer. That’s more likely.”
Abbey’s shared his efforts so far on social media, primarily X, formerly Twitter. One thread has up to 1.6 million views.
Along the way, he’s heard from professional and academic bean breeders who all think his project sounds “pretty cool.”
“A lot of their work is very much focused on specific production values, like disease resistance, protein levels — things like that that are absolutely important,” he said.
A novel color would likely attract attention, Abbey said.
But when companies put novel-colored products in stores, they tend not to do as well, he said, pointing to purple ketchup as an example.
“People say, ‘Oh, that’s weird,’ or ‘That stuff’s for kids,’ and it really doesn’t break into the market in general,” he said.
But beans already come in a wide array of colors. Abbey could easily imagine eventual bags of blue beans alongside red, yellow and black beans, or a bag of rainbow lima beans.
An accidental cross in Abbey’s garden resulted in a blue carrot.
“One turned up that was white with blue streaks,” he said. “So now that I know it’s possible, I’m going to see about making a blue carrot.”
It was “well outside what I expected for the color of a carrot,” he added.
Like the beans, Abbey could see blue carrots being mixed with carrots of other colors.
“If blue carrots end up in a grocery store, I expect people would find it very strange,” he said. “If you have a display of blue carrots right next to a display of orange carrots, I imagine orange carrots are going to get sold and blue carrots are going to get looked at.”
A farmer potentially wouldn’t have to do much that’s different raising blue crops compared to the regular crops, he said.
“The hypothetical variety I produce would not necessarily be well-suited to farming,” Abbey said of his blue lima beans. “It won’t necessarily have the stacked disease resistance traits, growth habit traits that are ideal for farming.”
A variety destined for field growing would be a much larger project, requiring much more investment from a university research lab or company partner, Abbey said.
He estimates he’s spent “maybe a few dozens of dollars above what I would have already spent on the gardens I use.”
“Basically, what it cost me to order the various seed varieties I thought might have useful genetics,” he said.
Abbey sees stages of potential success. One would be finally obtaining that first blue seed with the desired shade of blue.
It would take several years more to establish a variety, he added. The first plant doesn’t necessarily guarantee what its offspring will look like.
“At that point, then it gets a little harder,” he said.
He would like a blue variety to eventually be available commercially, but that requires effort and resources he hasn’t yet tackled.
In the meantime, his efforts offer life lessons about plant genetics and day-to-day plant breeding to the general public. Some viewers have started their own gardens or begun hybridizing beans because of his social media, he said.
Abbey often talks about the complex biology of blue pigments in plants.
“When I started all this, I had no knowledge of that,” he said. “I just had the idea of, ‘Huh, I wonder why blue isn’t common.’ So it’s really important to start the projects you’re interested in, not necessarily to know everything about it.”
The Biologist is In blog
https://the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.com/
Darren Abbey on X
