Food dyes can give cakes, candy and sodas brilliant colors of the rainbow. Now, a team of food scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey has found that food coloring may be able to play more than its traditional esthetic role in food presentation… The Rutgers researchers wondered if the edible colors already added to many food products could act as fluorescent probes… “Fluorescent probes have been used in many applications, but the idea of using food colors for this purpose is new,” said Sarah Waxman, an undergraduate student who is working on a research project to study the fluorescent properties of food dyes in the lab of Rutgers food scientist Richard Ludescher.