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Spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) accumulates high amounts of carotenoids, vitamin C, nitrate and oxalate. Breeding to reduce nitrate and oxalate levels and increase vitamin C and carotenoid levels is a major target in spinach nutritional quality improvement. Here we investigate natural variations in the levels of nitrate, oxalate, vitamin C, and total carotenoid in 98 spinach accessions, and correlations among these four nutritional components and 12 important morphological traits. Our results showed that the concentrations of nitrate, oxalate, vitamin C, and total carotenoid ranged from 0.21-3.83, 2.38-34.72, 0.51-1.30, and 0.18-0.58 mg g−1 fresh weight (FW), respectively. Moderate positive correlations were observed between the levels of oxalate and vitamin C, and between vitamin C and total carotenoid, whereas the levels of nitrate were correlated weakly and negatively with those of vitamin C and total carotenoid. The nitrate contents of crinkle-leaf accessions were significant higher than those of smooth-leaf accessions, and the smooth-leaf accessions had significantly higher concentrations of oxalate and vitamin C than crinkle-leaf accessions. Furthermore, hierarchical clustering analysis identified eight spinach accessions that could be served as starting materials for breeding new spinach cultivars with increased levels of vitamin C and carotenoids and simultaneously decreased accumulation of nitrate and oxalate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The phenomenon of granular flows appears frequently in industrial and daily life. The particle–particle interaction plays an important role in granular flows, which makes the flows have some strong nonlinear characteristics and so different from the normal materials, either solids or liquids. Discrete element method (DEM) is a powerful tool to catch this interaction in meso-scopic scale. A brief review of DEM is presented, including some of our new works in this area. DEM can also be coupled with other CFD methods for simulations of solid–liquid suspension flow. An example of such coupling is presented in this article as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]