Cellulose in Foliage and Changes during Seasonal Leaf Development of Broadleaf and Conifer Species.

Stable isotope approaches are widely applied in plant science and many improvements made in the field focus on the analysis of specific components of plant tissues. Although technical developments have been very beneficial, sample collection and preparation are still very time and labor-consuming. The main objective of this study was to create a qualitative dataset of alpha-cellulose content of leaf tissues of arboreal species. We extracted alpha-cellulose from twelve species: Abies alba Mill., Acer pseudoplatanus L., Fagus sylvatica L., Larix decidua Mill., Picea abies (L.) Karst., Pinus sylvestris L., Quercus cerris L., Quercus petrea (Matt.) Liebl., Quercus pubescens Wild., Quercus robur L., Tilia platyphyllos Scop. and Ulmus glabra Huds. While these species show an increase in cellulose yield from bud break to full leaf development, the rates of increase in cellulose content and the duration of the juvenile phase vary greatly. Moreover, the veins display significantly higher alpha-cellulose content (4 to 11%) compared to blade tissues, which reflects their different structural and biochemical functions. A guide for the mass of sample material required to yield sufficient alpha-cellulose for a standard stable isotope analysis is presented. The additional benefits of the assessment of the mass of required sample material are reduced sample preparation time and its usefulness in preparing samples of limited availability (e.g., herbarium material, fossil samples)

Are carbohydrate storage strategies of trees traceable by early-latewood carbon isotope differences?

Key message : Investigations of stable isotopes in early- and latewood cellulose offer interesting insights to climate-driven adaptations of trees' carbon storage strategy during different phenological phases. Abstract: We investigated δ13C isotopic composition in both earlywood and latewood. The origin of the samples is an oak forest (Quercus petraea), situated in Switzerland. A comparison of isotope compositions between early- and latewood can help us to investigate and understand the processes of plant metabolism in more detail. The fact which we found excellent correlations (r 2=55%) between early- and latewood for carbon isotopes strengthens the common knowledge that atmospheric CO2 acts as the major carbon source for latewood but the earlywood strongly depends on the reserves from previous years (r 2=68%), at least for oaks investigated in this study. In addition, that no correlation between late woods (r 2=0-5%) was found, manifests the higher variability of direct assimilates. Furthermore, we examined the impacts of increasing air temperature and CO2 concentration on carbohydrate fluxes in trees and we found remarkable differences between two time periods. In the period ad 1780-1825, the trees intensely used the young reserves while in the period ad 1960-1994, there is no clear preference of them. This suggests that in the latter period, a larger volume of reserves is available and that the new assimilated reserves (previous year) do not play the most important part, mainly due to the very favourable conditions induced by climate change, at the investigated site. In conclusion, a carbon isotope approach on early- and latewood samples is ideal to investigate isotope incorporation pathways of physiological processes. This will augment the interpretation of tree ring isotope records with respect to the assignments of their variations to specific biochemical processes within the tree, i.e. carbon allocation

Qualitative Distinction of Autotrophic and Heterotrophic Processes at the Leaf Level by Means of Triple Stable Isotope (C–O–H) Patterns

Foliar samples were harvested from two oaks, a beech, and a yew at the same site in order to trace the development of the leaves over an entire vegetation season. Cellulose yield and stable isotopic compositions (δ13C, δ18O, and δD) were analyzed on leaf cellulose. All parameters unequivocally define a juvenile and a mature period in the foliar expansion of each species. The accompanying shifts of the δ13C-values are in agreement with the transition from remobilized carbohydrates (juvenile period), to current photosynthates (mature phase). While the opponent seasonal trends of δ18O of blade and vein cellulose are in perfect agreement with the state-of-art mechanistic understanding, the lack of this discrepancy for δD, documented for the first time, is unexpected. For example, the offset range of 18 permil (oak veins) to 57 permil (oak blades) in δD may represent a process driven shift from autotrophic to heterotrophic processes. The shared pattern between blade and vein found for both oak and beech suggests an overwhelming metabolic isotope effect on δD that might be accompanied by proton transfer linked to the Calvin-cycle. These results provide strong evidence that hydrogen and oxygen are under different biochemical controls even at the leaf level

Simultaneous Determination of Stable Carbon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen Isotopes in Cellulose

A technological development is described through which the stable carbon-, oxygen-, and nonexchangeable hydrogen-isotopic ratios (δ13C,δ18O,δ2H) are determined on a single carbohydrate (cellulose) sample with precision equivalent to conventional techniques (δ13 C 0.15‰,δ18O 0.30‰,δ2H 3.0‰). This triple-isotope approach offers significant new research opportunities, most notably in physiology and medicine, isotope biogeochem- istry, forensic science, and palaeoclimatology, when isotopic analysis of a common sample is desirable or when sample material is limited

Are carbohydrate storage strategies of trees traceable by early–latewood carbon isotope differences?

Investigations of stable isotopes in early and latewood cellulose offer interesting insights to climate-driven adaptations of trees’ carbon storage strategy during different phenological phases