This Ph.D. thesis and the three enclosed manuscripts are the product of three and a half years of research from October 2019 to April 2023. The thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements to obtain the Ph.D. degree at the University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Science. Most of the experimental work was conducted at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, at the section for Crop Sciences and section for Soil and Plant Sciences. A second part of the experimental work was carried out at Department of Food Science – Plant, Food and Climate, Aarhus University, during a research stay in June 2022, in which period the final experiment of the project was conducted. The experimental work was supervised by Professor Fulai Liu, Associate Professor Eva Rosenqvist, and Professor Xiangnan Li. The Ph.D. work was funded by the Sino-Danish Center for Education and Research (SDC). The thesis includes an introduction, a background section, a literature review, an outline of methods and materials, a presentation and short discussion of the most important results, Conclusions, and an outlook with perspectives on future directions. The three manuscripts are enclosed as Appendix paper I, II and III, and a final experiment (experiment III) is accounted for in the results and discussion section.
First of all I would like to thank the Sino-Danish Center for Education and Research (SDC) for supporting this Ph.D. fellowship. I would also like to thank all the researchers and technical staff I have spent time together with in my days in Taastrup. I have sincerely enjoyed all the humourous mocking, the padding on the back, the personal talks and the discussions on the different aspects of plant growth. It has been a great pleasure. A special thanks to the gardeners Rene Hvidberg Petersen, Benitta Rueskov Wöhlk, and Kenneth Kauffmann for all their help with growing my plants, all the help was needed. I would like to thank Aarhus University, Professor Carl-Otto Ottosen and Yannick Valentin for a great collaboration on the exchange that was carried out in replacement for the exchange which was initially planned to Changchun. Thank you Yannick for making the long research days a pure pleasure. I would like to thank Professor Xiangnan Li for his generous help in supervising my work. It was unfortunate that my plans to stay in Changchun were canceled due to Covid, so we were not able to collaborate more. I would like to thank my main supervisor Professor Fulai Liu for giving me a chance to do a PhD in the crop stress physiology group. And also to undertake the, I expect, sometimes frustrating job of being main supervisor for an at times less focused mind. I have great respect for the professionalism and ingenuity that helped improve this thesis. Especially for keeping my head in the game and maintaining the focus of the project towards the goals that were originally set. I have enjoyed our discussions on all kind of subjects, and I am happy I was able to be part of a one-week trip to China. I would like to thank Associate Professor Eva Rosenqvist, whom I have collaborated closely with for many years now. The number of times I was picked up, and solutions were found to otherwise unsolvable issues are countless, and I am very thankful for that. Especially the help and support that was given by the end of this project has been out of the ordinary and will be difficult to repay. Off course not to forget all the talks we have had on food, plants, wildlife and yarn coloring that are even more numerous. I would like to thank my friends in general for all the support and listening to my agony. And off course to my collective for the effort of weeding out misspellings that was helped with at the end of thesis writing. Thank you to my family for the wanting to help, and always being there. Especially thanks to my dad for being my buddy, for endless amounts of encouragement, and for always believing in me.