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sant, depurative, digestive, disinfectant, emenagogue, expectorant, febri-fuge, laxative, and stimulant [3] properties. An antimutagenic effect of some essential oils from sagę has also been reported [4]. Intemal use of these es-sential oils can, however, be harmful, because of neurotoxicity related to substantial levels of thujone (which should be monitored in pharmaceuti-cals containing sagę or in essential oils from sagę). The essential oil from sagę is usually applied extemally, and is an important ingredient in the per-fume and cosmetics industries (particularly in skin care). Consequently, in-numerable beauty treatment products claim to contain sagę oil. The oil is, moreover, widely used in aromatherapy and as a natural insect repellent.

Another application of sagę is in food processing and cuisine. Sagę has been widely used, with rosemary and thyme, to preserve numerous foods, including meats and cheeses. The dried leaves and essential oil of sagę are used for seasoning sausages, ground meats, meat stuffing, fish, honey, sal-ads, soups, and stews. Sagę can also be used as a flavouring agent and anti-oxidant in cheeses, piekłeś, vegetables, processed foods, and beverages, and its essential oil is used to extend the shelf life of fats and meats. Sagę can be purchased as the whole leaf or ground, rubbed, sliced, or cut. The essential oils of some sagę species can even be obtained commercially.

Gas chromatography is the analytical techniąue of first choice most widely used for investigation of the components of essential oils. Head-space extraction and mass spectrometric detection (HS-GC-MS) are recom-mended for isolation and identificahon of these volatile compounds. Identification of the volatile plant components used to be a tedious task, however, basically because of the never exhausted ingenuity of Naturę combined with the high cost of commercial phytochemical standards. In numerous cases, even additional support of identification by use of a library of mass spectral proves insufficient and, hence, many essential oil constituents re-main unidentified. This is the main reason why fingerprinting of the differ-ent fractions derived from the plants is still a very popular phytochemical approach, applied in botany for comparison of the different species belong-ing to the same genus, and in pharmacognosy for assessment of crude me-dicinal plant materiał, etc.

Despite the great popularity of plants of the Salina genus in traditional medicine and in much other human activity, their Chemical composition has not yet been sufficiently explored. It is well known that ¹³C NMR spectro-scopy has proved a well performing analytical tool in the analysis of com-plex organie mixtures, including those from botanical sources [5-11]. The objechve of this study was, therefore, to demonstrate the usefulness of joint application of HS-GC-MS and ¹³C NMR spectroscopy to the analysis of the volatile fractions of two different Salina species, S. laiwndulifolia and S. tri-loba.