Mulder’s  Interaction  Chart

An ingenious wheel depicting various relationships amongst certain elements, used by various promoters of trace mineral products, appears throughout the INTERNET and in advertising literature.  It was reputedly first devised by D. Mulder—nothing to do with the “X-Files” television character “Fox Mulder",  played by David Duchovny.

Mulder published and explained his concept in his paper, Les elements mineurs en culture fruitière, pp. 188-198, presented in 1953 at the 1° Congegno Nazionale de Frutticotura, Montan de Saint Vincent. A number of different versions exist today of his Interaction Chart, ranging from complex embellishments (Figures 1, 2) to the simplistic one appearing on page 41 of Schutte and Myers’ book (Figure 3, below).

                                          Figure 1                                                                                                                Figure 2

Where any two arrows                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                       Figure 3                                                                                           

The Interaction of Elements

Quoting from ASPECTS of health –nutritional elements in health and disease by Karl H. Schutte  PhD and John A. Myers MD  (pages 41-42, 56,177, 182)

Every element in a nutrient solution influences the others, and a balance must be maintained between all nutrients, if healthy, efficient growth is to take place.  While this chart is very valuable, it must be remembered that it is a generalization.  All plants vary to some extent in their mineral requirements, and so this chart does not depict the responses of every plant species.  The fact that deficiencies and excesses of elements occur might lead one to conclude that an absolutely fixed minimum and maximum level for any element might be established in a given organism.  Unfortunately, this is not the case, because an organism’s requirements are influence by a host of factors besides it genetical  constitution.  Temperature, rainfall, day length, drainage, and such factors all play a part, but the most important determining influence is the nature of the other nutrients, especially the other mineral nutrients.

(The preceding paragraph and Figure 3 were actually from a reprint of The Biology of Elements contained in the aforesaid book.)

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