bio

Anthocyanin

The family of flavonoid pigments giving red, purple and blue to red cabbage, berries and red foliage. The most common confusion: anthocyanins absorb green light but do NOT pass that energy on to the photosynthetic machinery — they keep it. Their real roles are sunscreen, coolant, and mop for the reactive fragments intense light produces. So when explaining how a non-green leaf still feeds well, anthocyanin is the wrong answer: it accounts for the colour and contributes nothing to the harvest.