Black currants (Ribes nigrum L.) and their hybrid berries are distinguished by their exceptionally high content levels of anthocyanin and vitamin C, major phytochemicals with health-promoting properties. This study was designed to substantially reduce the HPLC runtime required for black currant anthocyanin analysis and clarify how key determinants, including morphological traits (berry size and peel proportion), genetic variation across 12 cultivars, and cryogenic milling, affect anthocyanin accumulation and quantification. A rapid HPLC protocol was developed that achieves the high-resolution separation of four major and eight minor anthocyanins in black currant within a 10 min run, enabling efficient, high-throughput analysis, very important in long-term breeding programs due to the large number of genotypes. Cryogenic grinding substantially enhanced the extraction yield and reproducibility relative to just blending. Using the improved extraction and analysis method, a set of anthocyanin content-related morphologic berry traits was systematically evaluated, providing information directly relevant to future phenotyping and breeding efforts. Smaller black currant berries generally have higher total anthocyanin content than larger berries, and these morphological attributes are tightly linked to the genotype. Although a higher peel proportion was related to higher anthocyanin content within genotype, there was no global trend, and anthocyanin contents were similar in different size berry peels.
Miķelsone et al. (Wed,) studied this question.