Mark Christensen in NZ is working on nutrients in apples a lot. He has found a seedling “Monty’s surprise” has fantastic levels of secondary metabolites. Though they graft this seedlings he should know a bit about the variation of secondary metabolites in the samples.

The latest that I know of him was that he wanted to look into crystal’s birefringence pictures under the microscope to get a quick method to visualize these things.

The company Soyana (Mr. Denzer) in Switzerland has refined a proprietary protocol of plant sap crystallization that allows them to distinguish between organic and conventional produce. In the beginning this felt esoteric, but considering different minerals in different concentrations with their different crystallization behaviors it is probably not.