Abstract
Essential oils are highly volatile, aromatic concentrated extracts from plants with wide applications. In this study, fast, easy-to-use attenuated total reflection Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) was combined with chemometric techniques to verify essential oils’ taxonomy and purity. Principal component analysis (PCA) clustered 30 essential oil samples into three different groups based on plant botanical family and concentration. The first group contained highly concentrated oils from the Asteraceae family, the second group contained highly concentrated oils from the Lamiaceae family, while the last group contained three highly concentrated essential oils from different botanical families and commercial-grade essential oils. Thus, commercial-grade oil samples did not cluster with the corresponding concentrated oil samples despite their similar spectral patterns or botanical family. A loading plot identified infrared (IR) bands that correspond to carbonyl, vinyl, methyl and methylene group vibrations as the most important spectral bands that can be used as marker bands for discrimination between different botanical plant family groups. Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) confirmed the results obtained by PCA. ATR-FTIR spectroscopy combined with chemometric algorithms provides a direct and non-destructive method for chemotaxonomic classification of medicinal and aromatic essential oils and an assessment of their purity.
Highlights
The global essential oils market has experienced steady and strong growth in almost every major end-use industry, such as food and beverage, personal care, cosmetics, and aromatherapy.Health benefits associated with essential oils use are expected to further drive their demand in pharmaceutical and medical applications
After filtering and normalization (Standard Normal Variate, SNV), the principal component analysis of 16 samples of concentrated essential oils from FLAVEX® clustered samples resulted in a two-component model that explained 69.50% of the total variance
The ATR-Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) method with chemometric evaluation was successfully applied as an objective method for the qualitative discrimination of essential oils from different plant species
Summary
The global essential oils market has experienced steady and strong growth in almost every major end-use industry, such as food and beverage, personal care, cosmetics, and aromatherapy. Health benefits associated with essential oils use are expected to further drive their demand in pharmaceutical and medical applications. Unlike most of the conventional medicines and drugs, essential oils have no major side effects. Such qualities of essential oils are expected to be a major factor for market growth. The rising prevalence of age- and stress-related health problems, such as cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and anxiety, is creating more demand for.
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