The world around us is colourful. Wherever you look, you see various colours of different shades and hues.
And only thanks to pigments, life on Earth is possible. Pigments were the first molecules that microbes used to harvest sunlight. Microbes could then transform the light energy into chemical energy and produce oxygen.
Even the brown-reddish haemoglobin in your blood is an essential pigment as it transports oxygen within your body. Also for bacteria, pigments and their colours have life-saving functions. Here, we will look at how biopigments colour the bacterial world and what bacteria gain from producing them.
