117828199

Yolatile Fraction from Sagę (Salvia L.) Species 3

technique been used on a wider scalę for metabolomic studies of plants, animals, and humans, with the objective of toxicological studies and bio-marker discovery, disease diagnosis, and classification.

GC-MS is ideally suited to the analysis of non-polar analytes, for ex-ample synthetic organie compounds and hydrophobic natural produets. and has traditionally been used for this purpose. GC-MS is distinctly differ-ent from the two other and better established analytical methods used in metabolomics, i.e. nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and liquid chroma-tography with mass spectrometric detection (LC-MS), in the sense that it covers a unique rangę of analyte polarity. It has been found that the overlap between the GC-MS and LC-MS metabolomic profiling data is limited, be-cause of differences between the separation and ionization mechanisms. GC-MS is highly sensitive and, therefore, can be used for the analysis of less commonly encountered types of sample that might only be available in very smali amounts.

Thus with an advanced and very diverse variety of separation tools at our disposal, chemotaxonomy of plants has, for the first time, become an available and, therefore, tempting target. Even the exceUent performance of modern chromatography does not, however, guarantee successful devel-opment of chemotaxonomy. The crucial issue seems to be, e.g., repeatable appearance of plant constituents selected as its biomarkers, irrespective of the growing season and other extemal factors.

The objective of this study was to compare, by use of gas chromatogra-phy with mass spectrometric detection (GC-MS) the efficiency isolation of volatile compounds from the five different Safoia L. species (S. lauandulifolia, S. staminea, S. hi ans, S. triloba, and S. nemorosa) by use of four different isolation techniques (the head-space extraction at 70 and 80°C, vapour distilla-tion in the Deryng apparatus, and accelerated solvent extraction (ASE)]. We also compared the composition of the volatile fraction from samples of these species obtained during two different growing seasons (2007 and 2008). From this comparison we tried to assess the usefulness for chemotax-onomy of the volatile fraction derived from these plant species.

Experimental

Plant Materiał

Samples of the five different sagę species investigated in this study were collected in the Pharmacognosy Garden of the Medical University, Lublin, Poland, on August 20th, 2007 and on October 20th, 2008. Plant materiał was dried at 35 to 40°C for 40 h in an oven with a forced air flow. The dry matę-