Planetary nebulae, tracers of stellar nucleosynthesis

Abstract

We review the information that planetary nebulae and their immediate progenitors, the post-AGB objects, can provide to probe the nucleosynthesis and mixing in low and intermediate mass stars. We emphasize new approaches based on high signal-to-noise spectroscopy of planetary nebulae and of their central stars. We mention some of the problems still to overcome. We emphasize that, as found by several authors, planetary nebulae in low metallicity environments cannot be used to probe the oxygen abundance in the interstellar medium out of which their progenitors were formed, because of abundance modification during stellar evolution.