History of Selection and Improvement of Blueberries

History of Selection and Improvement of Blueberries
During the 1890s, various plant scientists in Maine, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, and other areas made limited efforts to select and transplant particularly good wild bushes for commercial production.

None of these was successful.

Recognizing both the potential widespread commercial value of the blueberry and the demand for the fruit on the Boston market, Dr. Frederick V. Coville, a botanist with the United States Department of Agriculture, began extensive research on the plant in 1906.

He joined forces with the commercial grower who had been instructing her workers to select and transplant especially good will blueberry plants from the wetlands surrounding her bog.

After discovery the plants’ soil requirements, Dr. Coville de devoted another two years to their culture from seed to fruit and investigated methods of propagating and pollinating the bushes.

In 1908, the first wild highbush blueberry plant for breeding purpose was selected in Greenfield, New Hampshire and named ‘Brooks.’

By the time of his death in 1937, Dr. Coville had propagated over 68,000 seedlings, from which he had selected and introduced 15 improved cultivars (some of them third generation hybrids).

Coville and others realized that interspecific crosses could readily be made between species with the same chromosome number (homoploids).

He recorded successful hybrids between Vaccinium stamineum L. (deerberry) and V. myrtilloides Mich. as well as between V. melanocarpum Mohr. and V. myrtilloides Mich.

The discovery of interspecific hybridization permitted plant breeders to combine desirable traits (such as cold hardiness, higher sugar content, and drought tolerance) of several species into a single plant.

Interspecific hybridization ensures the diversification not only of the blueberry industry but also of the gene pool available to growers.

This diversification is nature’s way of guaranteeing that no single natural calamity will obliterate blueberry production.

To extend the range of blueberry production into northern areas, breeders following Dr. Coville’s lead have crossed the highbush with the lowbush species to reduce plant height, thus taking advantage of insulating snow cover, while at the same time increasing fruit size.

Many of the progeny also have flexible canes that bend but do not break, under snow.

The half highs are often twiggy and strongly rhizomatous, and they may spread out of their rows when planted too far south.
History of Selection and Improvement of Blueberries

Short History of Vitamin D

Hippocrates, the father of medicine, used heliotherapy or exposure to sunlight to treat phthisis.

The Greek historian, Herodotus (485-426 BC), observed that Persian warriors had much softer skulls than Egyptian warriors and attributed it to the turbans worn by Persians and Hippocrates described as disease resembling rickets in 130 AD.

The first scientific description of a vitamin D-deficiency, namely rickets, was provided in the 17th century by both Dr. Daniel Whistler (1645) and Professor Francis Glisson (1650).

Cod liver oil was first described as a medicinal agent for the treatment of chronic rheumatism in 1789.

Rickets captured the imagination of many chroniclers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cause of this was a lack of a vitamin that is not a vitamin.

Beginning in the 1820s, studies showed that administering doses of cod liver oil to afflicted children could cure rickets.

The major breakthrough in understanding the causative factors of rickets was the development in the period 1910 - 1930 of nutrition as an experimental science and the appreciation of the existence of vitamins.

It was in 1919/20 that Sir Edward Mellanby, working with dogs raised exclusively indoors (in the absence of sunlight or ultraviolet light), devised a diet that allowed him to unequivocally establish that the bone disease, rickets was caused by a deficiency of a trace component present in the diet.

In 1921 he wrote, "The action of fats in rickets is due to a vitamin or accessory food factor which they contain, probably identical with the fat-soluble vitamin."

Shortly thereafter E. V McCollum and McCallum succeeded in inducing a rickets-like disease in chickens by administering an incomplete diet. The disease could be cured with cod-liver oil. They assumed that vitamin, present in cod-liver oil, was responsible for the curative effect.

In 1923 Goldblatt and Soames clearly identified that when a precursor of vitamin D in the skin (7-dehydrocholestrol) was irradiated with sunlight or ultraviolet light, a substance equivalent to the fat-soluble vitamin was produced.

Huldschinsky, Hess and Steenbock in 1924 found that a great number of foodstuff, having no antirachitic properties, became antirachitic after irradiation with sunlight or ultraviolet light. The substance activated by sunlight was called ‘provitamin D.’

Several other independent observations in the 19th and early 20th centuries fostered further links between sunlight and cutaneous vitamin D synthesis.

The first analogue of the vitamins D were determined in the 1930s in the laboratory of Professor A. Windaus at the University of Gottingen in Germany.

With the chemical isolation and finally synthesis of the two parent or native D vitamins, vitamin D2 (egocalciferol) and vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol), an etiology therapy for rickets and osteomalacia was established.

Vitamin D2 which could be produced by ultraviolet irradiation of ergosterol was chemically characterized in 1932. Vitamin D3 was not chemically characterized until 1936 when it was shown to result from the ultraviolet irradiation of 7-dehydrocholesterol.

In 1970, it is learned that vitamin D was not the biological active principle for healing bone disease.
Short History of Vitamin D