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Dried plant materiał (50 g) from the 2008 vegetation season was placed in a round-bottomed fiask and 400 mL water was added. Vapour distillation was performed for 3 h by use of the Deryng apparatus, as described in the Polish Pharmacopoeia VI [12]. Again, three replicates of each sample were processed identically and the distillates were analyzed by 13C NMR spec-trometry.
13C NMR spectra were recorded with Bruker instruments working at 100 MHz (Avance UitraShield) and 150 MHz (Avance II UltraShield Plus), using power-gated proton decoupling. Samples were dissolved in CDCfe to fumish approx. 10% (v/v) Solutions and TMS was used as an intemal refer-ence. For real mixtures of the natural products twenty-thousand seans were found adequate to reveal the presence of a dozen principal components, but inereasing the number of seans even to forty-thousand was very rewarding and revealed many morę compounds present at much lower concentrations. The spectra of individual compounds and of their synthetic mixtures, re-corded to acquire their spectral data, were satisfactory after 2500 seans.
It is apparent from the results listed in Tobie I (and from our earlier investi-gations [13,14] of twenty different sagę species) that fourteen different vola-tile compounds were identified in the two sagę species discussed in this study. It had, moreover, previously been established [13] that P-myrcene can be regarded as a chemotaxonomic marker of S. lauatidulifolia, and p-trans-ocimene and thujone can be regarded as chemotaxonomic advice compounds. Only thujone can be regarded as chemotaxonomic advice con-stituent for S. triloba.
Chromatograms obtained from the volatde compounds isolated from S. Itwandulifolia and S. triloba from two different vegetation seasons are pre-sented in Fig. 1. Visual inspection of these chromatograms reveals striking qualitative similarity between the volatile fractions obtained from the same species, irrespective of vegetation season, yet differences between the chromatographic fingerprints from the two different Salina species are also evident.