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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2025

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Sammendrag

Vaccinium uliginosum (bog bilberry) is widely consumed in North America and Asia but has been historically avoided in many parts of Europe due to its alleged poisonous effects. We aimed to address this discrepancy in a systematic way with a combined phytochemical and ethnopharmacological approach, using UHPLC and UHPSFC for the chemical analysis, model organisms Caenorhabditis elegans and human liver cells GFP-Huh-7 for the bioactivity and toxicity testing, as well as fermentation experiments. Phytochemical analysis revealed minimal differences in the metabolite pattern between European and North American samples, with no evidence of toxic alkaloids or harmful secondary metabolites. Extracts exhibited no strongly toxic effects in the tested concentrations, neither in vitro (cell viability) nor in vivo (C. elegans). Berries infected by Monilinia megalospora showed altered flavonoid and anthocyanin contents but no increased toxicity. Notably, bog bilberries demonstrated a fermentation potential superior to Vaccinium myrtillus, resulting in an alcohol content of 4.8–5.8% ABV in unsweetened juices, thus potentially explaining historical accounts of inebriation. In conclusion, direct toxicity derived from these fruits is unlikely, but the alcohol content due to fruit fermentation is a plausible explanation for the folklore names (“drunk, inebriating berry”). However, additional factors such as human error, individual intolerance, or endophytic activity need to be considered.

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As droughts become longer and more intense, impacts on terrestrial primary productivity are expected to increase progressively. Yet, some ecosystems appear to acclimate to multiyear drought, with constant or diminishing reductions in productivity as drought duration increases. We quantified the combined effects of drought duration and intensity on aboveground productivity in 74 grasslands and shrublands distributed globally. Ecosystem acclimation with multiyear drought was observed overall, except when droughts were extreme (i.e., ≤1-in-100-year likelihood of occurrence). Productivity losses after four consecutive years of extreme drought increased by ~2.5-fold compared with those of the first year. These results portend a foundational shift in ecosystem behavior if drought duration and intensity increase, from maintenance of reduced functioning over time to progressive and profound losses of productivity when droughts are extreme.

Sammendrag

The value of genetic resources in agriculture is hard to overestimate as they are decisive for food safety, provide options for adaptation of future diet needs, and underpin a vast amount of biodiversity. To enable an effective conservation of these resources, we need knowledge about where they are located. The EU project GenRes Bridge showed that this knowledge is indeed modest at the European level. A source of genetic resources with particular potential for use in agriculture, e.g. related to the future adaptation to climate change, are crop wild relatives (CWR). Crop wild relatives are plant species categorized as wild relatives of cultivated plants and are used here as an indicator of genetic resources in the landscape. We therefore wanted to explore new ways of identifying hotspots of genetic resources, highlighting the landscape as a starting point. It is well established that landscape heterogeneity is closely related to biodiversity, although to our knowledge studies hitherto have rarely looked at the relation between landscape and genetic resources. Focusing on crop wild relatives, used here as an indicator for genetic resources in the landscape, we wanted to assess whether we could identify how landscape variation in topography and land cover has consequences for the spatial distribution of genetic resources that may be important in the future development of agriculture. Here we report the results from this pilot study where we have tested whether there is a correlation between landscape heterogeneity and agricultural genetic resources, using 5 x 5 km grid cells as spatial units. We used the presence of the crop wild relatives (CWR) which are prioritized for conservation in Norway as indicators of agricultural genetic resource diversity and extracted landscape heterogeneity descriptors from publicly available sources. The results from our study do suggest that landscape diversity could be a path worth following in searching for these resources in the landscape, and thus also important in decision-making on planning and management in these diverse landscapes.

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Sammendrag

Leather rot of strawberry fruit caused by the oomycete Phytophthora cactorum is detrimental to both freshly consumed and processed produce of this crop because of an off-odour flavour caused by two phenolic compounds, 4-ethylphenol (4-EP) and 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (4-ethyl guaiacol, 4-EG). In this study, we have investigated differences in off-odour among strawberry genotypes and how the perception of the off-odour varies among people. Fruit of 13 strawberry genotypes, including five cultivars and eight selections, inoculated with P. cactorum were assessed by a sensory panel to determine differences in the characteristic leather rot odour. The content of aroma compounds, including the two phenolics, was analysed by headspace GC/MS and compared with sensory analysis. The amount of 4-EP and 4-EG varied greatly among the genotypes, and although the ones with the highest and lowest sensory scores also had the highest and lowest amounts of the phenolics, the correlation between their content and leather rot odour was not significant. The results clearly indicated that aroma components, of which the major ones were butanoic acid and acetic acid methyl and ethyl esters, hexanoic acid methyl ester and acetone, were important for the perception of leather rot off-odour. This suggests that natural strawberry aroma compounds can partly mask the characteristic leather rot odour independent of the level of the off-odour compounds. Consumer tests showed great variation in the ability of people to recognize the leather rot off-odour of strawberry fruit, especially at lower levels, but a few people were not able to detect the odour at all. The amount of contaminated strawberry fruit necessary for olfactory identification and to set an odour threshold of leather rot is further discussed.