Shredded in salads and slaws, steamed, or just peeled and dunked in an herb-speckled dip, carrots are versatile veggies that add colorful zest to our dinner plates. These crunchy orange roots are also a well-known source of vitamin A. Just a single, full-size carrot more than fulfills an adult's daily quotient of the essential vitamin.
But the carrot hasn't always been the vitamin A powerhouse that it is today. Over two decades ago, scientists in the ARS Vegetable Crops Research Unit at Madison, Wisconsin, began a quest to breed carrots packed with beta-carotene — an orange pigment used by the body to create vitamin A. Thanks largely to this ARS work, today's carrots provide consumers with 75 percent more beta-carotene than those available 25 years ago.
The researchers, led by plant geneticist Philipp Simon, haven't limited themselves to the color orange. They've selectively bred a rainbow of carrots — purple, red, yellow, even white. Scientists are learning that these plant pigments perform a range of protective duties in the human body — which is not surprising, says Simon, since many of the pigments serve to shield plant cells during photosynthesis.

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