Sammendrag
Berries of the wild arctic bramble, Rubus arcticus L., are important raw material for the traditional liquor industry in Finland. Cultivation trials have been carried out since Carl von Linnaeus himself transferred the first arctic bramble plants to the Botanical Garden in Uppsala (Sweden) in 1762. A breakthrough in the successful cultivation and breeding of this plant is awaited in the near future, despite several cultivation attempts carried out in Finland since 1950. The genuine and characteristic aroma of arctic bramble berries, however, makes continuous trials and breeding of this plant worthwhile. Approximately eighty aroma volatiles have been identified by headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) combined with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) in samples of the old cultivars ‘Mesma’, ‘Pima’ and a new breeding line 12B14, recently named ‘Alli’, which has been shown to be relatively resistant against devastating downy mildew disease. The high-impact aroma compound mesifurane (2,5-dimethyl-4-methoxy-2,3-dihydro-3-furanone) was detected at high levels in all berries, together with other important aroma volatiles such as 2-heptanol, linalool, and ethyl esters of benzoic acid, acetic acid and hexanoic acid. This suggests that arctic bramble can be bred for downy mildew resistance without losing the genuine aroma. Further multivariate statistical analyses revealed clear segregation patterns between the three cultivars (principal component analysis) and biosynthetic relationships of aroma volatiles from different metabolic pathways (hierarchical cluster analysis). Our results show that volatile profiling by HS-SPME-GC/MS can be applied as an efficient tool for quality assessment and breeding purposes in Rubus arcticus.
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