Octopuses and other cephalopods are masters of camouflage , thanks largely to color-changing skin that can help them seemingly vanish into the background. Now, researchers report a big step towards being able to recreate their superpower.

A team led by UC San Diego was able to mass-produce a key pigment, xanthommatin, that occurs in the psychedelic skin of many cephalopods. Until now, xanthommatin has proven impractical to collect from animals or make in a lab.

The researchers technically didn't make the pigment. They bioengineered bacteria to make it, coaxing microbes to not only produce this rare substance, but to do so with unprecedented efficiency, yielding up to 1,000 times more xanthommatin than previous methods.

Easier access to xanthommatin could aid efforts to study cephalopo

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