Abstract
In this work, we aimed at determining some nutrients from Origanum compactum (OC) and comparing its essential oils (OCEOs) isolated using microwave-assisted extraction (MW) and Clevenger hydrodistillation (HD). To this end, dried flowering tops from OC were subjected to nutrients screening, OCEOs were isolated separately using MW and HD and then analyzed using GC-MS. Our results showed that OC contained important amounts of moisture (58.66%), minerals (10.26%), mainly K (6.22), Ca (2.62), Mg (2.09mg/gDM), Fe (0.998), Mn (0.085 mg/gDM), proteins (5.65%DM), chlorophyll a (1.09) and b (0.20 mg/gDM), and several amino acids. Among them, two (Ile and Leu) were essential. MW showed its superiority in terms of OCEO yield (7.41%), total compounds (95.57%), and almost individual compounds. These results were confirmed by the principal component analysis, which discriminated clearly MW and HD through the first component. In both techniques, thymol and carvacrol were the major constituents accounting for 78.81 ± 0.22 and 14.84 ± 0.39%, respectively, in the case of MW against 75.07 ± 0.99 and 13.03 ± 0.30% for HD. Following our outcomes, OCEO was a thymol chemotype, and OC contained important amounts of nutrients. MW could serve as a green, efficient method over HD for OCEO isolation.
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