Hopp til hovedinnholdet

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.

2021

To document

Abstract

Studies in natural populations are essential to understand the evolutionary ecology of senescence and terminal allocation. While there are an increasing number of studies investigating late-life variation in different life-history traits of wild populations, little is known about these patterns in social behaviour. We used long-term individual based data on yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer) to quantify how affiliative social behaviours and different life-history traits vary with age and in the last year of life, and how patterns compare between the two. We found that some social behaviours and all life-history traits varied with age, whereas terminal last year of life effects were only observed in life-history traits. Our results imply that affiliative social behaviours do not act as a mechanism to adjust allocation among traits when close to death, and highlight the importance of adopting an integrative approach, studying late-life variation and senescence across multiple different traits, to allow the identification of potential trade-offs. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ageing and sociality: why, when and how does sociality change ageing patterns?’

To document

Abstract

Essential oils are liquid mixtures of volatile compounds extracted from plants. Their quality is usually controlled via gas chromatography (GC), although with limitations when adulterants are nonvolatile substances. The essential oils of lavender (Lavandula angustifolia Mill.), peppermint (Mentha piperita L.), patchouli (Pogostemon cablin Benth), and their adulterated versions were measured by GC coupled to flame ionization detector (GC-FID) and Raman spectroscopy. Canola oil, a nonvolatile substance, was used as the adulterant. The adulterated essential oils contained 1%, 3%, 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% (v/v) of canola oil. Chromatograms of the adulterated essential oils containing 20% (v/v) of canola oil showed decrements in peak areas of the essential oil components, compared with peaks of the pure essential oils. The highest decrements were observed for the adulterated essential oil of patchouli. In general, detection of adulterated essential oils by simple visual inspection of the Raman features was difficult, due to slight differences observed in the spectra. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) allowed achieving a good spectral discrimination between pure and adulterated essential oils. These results suggest that Raman spectroscopy can overcome limitations of GC-based methods, thus becoming an interesting alternative and complementary technique for quality control of essential oils.