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Abstract
Essential oils of plant origin are the multicomponent mixtures of mono-, di-, tri-, and sesquiterpenes. Due to their recognized curative, cosmetic, and nutritional properties on the one hand and an outstanding modern analytical potential on the other, qualitative and quantitative composition of essential oils currently is in the focus of interest for phytochemistry and pharmacognosy. Due to the recognized volatility of the essential oil components, in their case the analytical method of choice is gas chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (GC-MS). However, great versatility of planar chromatography has resulted in a number of successful applications of this relatively simple and inexpensive separation technique to the investigations on composition of the volatile plant constituents as well. Generally, the low temperature preparative layer chromatography (PLC) is used for preliminary fractionation of the essential oils, and the separated fractions are further analyzed by means of GC-MS. In this study, we scrutinized a possibility of using the low temperature analytical thin-layer chromatography (TLC) to fingerprinting of the essential oils originating from the five different sage (Salvia) species, i.e., S. lavandulifolia, S. staminea, S. hians, S. triloba, and S. nemorosa. We also used the low temperature PLC for the preliminary fractionation of these essential oils prior to the GC-MS analysis. It was shown that the low temperature TLC can successfully be applied to fingerprinting the different sage (Salvia) species. Fractionation of the essential oils from the sage species by means of the low temperature PLC prior to the GC-MS analysis is also possible, although individual stages of the approach still need an additional optimization.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work of two authors (Ł.W. and D.S.) was partially supported by the PhD scholarship granted to them in 2009 within the framework of the ‘University as a Partner of the Economy Based on Science’ (UPGOW) project, subsidized by the European Social Fund (EFS) of the European Union.