Advances of Modern Gas Chromatography and Hyphenated Techniques for Analysis of Plant Extracts

Abstract

Modern gas chromatography, with the development of advanced analytical techniques, has become a fundamental tool for the separation and characterization of plant extracts. These last issues are absolutely important if considering the widespread use of plant derivatives not only in pharmaceutical/food industry but also, for a large part, in traditional and alternative medicine, which require a high level of quality and safety. Hence, the development of new, powerful hyphenated GC techniques were reviewed in this article, including Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS), Solid Phase Microextraction-Gas Chromatography (SPME-GC), Gas Chromatography- Fourier-transformed Infrared Spectroscopy (GC-FTIR), Multidimensional Gas Chromatography (MDGC) and Comprehensive Gas Chromatography (GCxGC). Several applications of each technique were reported and illustrated.