Translating values to gradient color scale

I have a weighted PCA with 2 variables:

[wcoeff,score,~,~,~] = pca(vars,'VariableWeights','variance');

coefforth = inv(diag(std(vars)))* wcoeff;

figure(1)

biplot(coefforth(:,1:2),'scores',score(:,1:2));

How can I "translate" the values of "Component 1" (just one axis) to a color gradient map that I could use to color code another plot?

For example: the right-most datapoints in "Component 1" as blue and a color gradient to the left-most datapoints of "Component 1" in red.

Also, the PCA spreads the datapoints in a perpendicular angle, is there a way to spread the data in a 180 degree angle? In other words, is there a way to set the direction?