If you've ever seen the white carrots in the market and thought they looked strange compared to their vibrant counterparts, you aren't alone – but you've got it all wrong. 

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This may come as a surprise to you but: carrots haven't always been orange. Those white carrots are the ancestors to the orange ones, and through genetic sequencing scientists have identified the exact genes that give the ubiquitous veggies the hue we're so accustomed to seeing today. Their study was published online this week in the journal Nature Genetics. 

As a crop, carrots were first cultivated in Asia more than a thousand years ago. Those carrots were yellow and purple, a press release from the University of Wisconsin-Madison notes, and the first orange carrots came about in Europe in the 16th century.

Where did the orange color come from? The answer hid within the plant's 32,000 genes.

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"As well as sequencing the carrot genome we also studied specific genes, in particular part of the genome that includes the Y gene,"  Phil Simon, horticulture professor and geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the study's lead author, told ABC News. "We found that the Y-gene accounts for the accumulation of orange and yellow carotenoid pigments in carrot roots. It is one of two genes responsible for converting ancestral wild-type white carrots to orange ones." 

Carotenoids (like beta-carotene) usually aid in photosynthesis and are responsible for pigmentation, setting the white carrots apart from the yellow and orange ones; normally they wouldn't appear in such quantities in root vegetables because they grow in the ground, unexposed to sunlight, but that's not the case with carrots.

“It’s a repurposing of genes plants usually use when growing in light,” Simon said in statement. 

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Simon said early growers of carrots may have benefited from this gene selection because it set apart wild carrots from the ones they were trying to domesticate.  

“They could keep their crops ‘clean’ from a patch of wild carrots growing 50 meters away by choosing only the purple or yellow ones,” Simon said.

Regardless of the reason why, that accidental selection was beneficial in the long run. As it happens, more so than white, orange, yellow or purple, the orange carrots have the most nutrition, thanks to those high levels of alpha- and beta-carotene.

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