To Örebro University

Pine needles have been considered to be useful bio-indicators for air pollution. This phenomenon can be used for environmental studies for monitoring purposes. Additionally, this fact offers the possibility to study uptake and accumulation behaviour not only in different species, but also in hybrids obtained from common pine trees to inheritage processes. Therefore, needles of Pinus nigra Arnold and Pinus thunbergiana Franco as well as of their F1 hybrids were investigated for essential and non-essential metals, such as Al, B, Ba, Ca, Cd, Co, Cu, Cr, Fe, K, Mg, Mn, Mo, Na, Ni, Pb, Sr, and Zn. The samples underwent acidic microwave-assisted digestion prior to analysis inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES). Furthermore flavonoids were quantitatively determined to prove hybrid character.

Regarding all determined analytes, increase and decrease of uptake in the needles of the hybrids were evaluated in comparison to the needles of the parent pine species to see which parent is the dominant one. In the hybrids higher amounts of Al, Cd, Mo, Ni, Mg, Mn, and Zn were found. Different behaviour was registered for flavonoids than for metals, due to different metabolic pathways.