Abstract
The pure Soqotri resin of Dracaena cinnabari Balf.f. (Dracaenaceae) has no volatile smell due to its low content of volatile constituents. Although it is insoluble in n-Hexane, we found that the resin, when suspended in n-Hexane within five days at 5 °C, led to the extraction of a small portion of a single volatile liquid constituent, which was identified by GC-MS as sesquiterpene β-caryophyllene. This method of extracting the volatile constituents using hexane under cooling is very suitable for resins of the Dracaena species because these resins usually contain very few volatile terpenes and/or non-terpenes, and they may contain only one volatile terpene per resin as this study result. β-Caryophyllene was identified and separated for the first time from the Soqotri standard resin of Dracaena cinnabari. Therefore, β-caryophyllene, as a new chemical property, can support to evaluate the purity of the Soqotri resin. Moreover, a big mass of D. cinnabari resin can yield concentrated β-caryophyllene as a liquid extract for further pharmaceutical and nutraceutical applications.
Highlights
Several phenolic derivatives have been isolated and identified in the resins of different species of Dracaena; for example, D. cinnabari resin, which mostly contains flavonoids [1]
We studied a method to obtain the volatile content of the D. cinnabari resin by n-hexane extraction for five days under low temperature
The Soqotri standard resin of Dracaena cinnabari is insoluble in n-hexane [1] due to its rare content of volatiles
Summary
Several phenolic derivatives have been isolated and identified in the resins of different species of Dracaena; for example, D. cinnabari resin, which mostly contains flavonoids [1]. The volatile content of the resin has been rarely studied due to the difficulty of the solubility of the resin in nonpolar solvents such n-hexane and due to the very low content of the volatile oil in the resin that cannot be obtained by the method of water distillation. We studied a method to obtain the volatile content of the D. cinnabari resin by n-hexane extraction for five days under low temperature. Β-Caryophyllene has been reported as an antimicrobial, antioxidant, and cytotoxic agent [3,4,5]. These results explain that the combination of β-caryophyllene and polyphenols can insert a strong synergist effect on the biological and pharmacological activities of the Soqotri resin including its activities against cancer cell lines [6]
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