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)

Long-term performance of simultaneous measurement of stable isotopes of oxygen and carbon in cellulose with a high-temperature pyrolysis/gas chromatography/isotope ratio mass spectrometry system at the Institute for Geological and Geochemical Research

A high-temperature pyrolysis/gas chromatography/isotope ratio mass spectrometry system was established at the Institute for Geological and Geochemical Research in 2013. A dedicated field of application of the system is the simultaneous measurement of stable carbon and oxygen isotope ratios in the cellulose of modern, relict and subfossil plant tissues and sediments. The measurement protocol was fine-tuned during the first year of operation and documented in detail in this report. To quantify the long-term reproducibility of the simultaneous measurement of stable isotopes of oxygen and carbon in cellulose, a 2σ range inferred from repeated measurements of a Quality Assurance standard can be recommended: 0.16 and 0.20‰, for δ 13 C and δ 18 O, respectively. An extensive set of samples with known pyrolysis-based δ 13 C data was analyzed in combustion mode and the paired results were used to assess the necessity of adjustment of the pyrolysis-based δ 13 C measurements. The variances of the two datasets were not significantly different; the slope (intercept) of the regression was indistinguishable from unity (zero), suggesting that probably owing to the relatively frequent cleaning of the pyrolysis furnace, pyrolysis-based δ 13 C data neither suffer from a variance bias nor require a specific adjustment