In structural colour, tiny structures produce colour, without the need for a coloured pigment. But that means that by measuring the colour, we can directly measure the structure itself too! – even if it’s transparent, embedded in living, growing cell wall, and changing its dimensions only a fraction of a wavelength of light, much smaller than you can image normally using a microscope. That’s what we did here, and showed that what happens in biology is not simply a case of passive self-assembly as we see in artificial samples.

Read the paper here