A comparative study of the volatiles emitted by flowers of three Hedychium species from La Réunion

ABSTRACT

With the objective to develop a scent database that could be used for perfume and cosmetics applications, a comparative analysis of the floral profiles close to one hundred odorous flowering plants found in Reunion Island has been undertaken for the last few years in our laboratory. A part of this work relating to three Hedychium species (the well-known H. coronarium but also H. flavescens and H. gardnerianum) is presented here. To achieve this, the solid-phase microextraction (SPME) on living flowers coupled to GC/MS was used. A total of 53 volatiles were identified belonging to aliphatic ketones, monoterpenes (hydrocarbons and oxygenated), sesquiterpenes (hydrocarbons and oxygenated), phenylpropanoids/benzenoids and miscellaneous. The phenylpropanoid/benzenoid and terpenoid classes were the main volatile classes. (E)-β-ocimene, linalool, (E,E)-α-farnesene, (E)-nerolidol, methyl benzoate, methyl salicylate, (E)-isoeugenol and indole were the major compounds detected. Results also revealed significant aroma variation among the different flowers.

KEYWORDS:

• Hedychium coronarium
• H. flavescens
• H. gardnerianum
• flowers
• SPME-GC/MS

Acknowledgments

We are particularly grateful to Sylvie Baudino for inviting us to participate in the Article Collection of the journal Botany Letters on the topic “Plants and scents”. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their insightful comments and suggestions.

Author contributions

The authors (A. Gauvin-Bialecki and J. Smadja) were involved in conceptualization, supervision, chemical investigations and the writing of the manuscript. They both gave final approval for the submission of the manuscript.

You can cite all versions by using the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.6519463.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23818107.2022.2125901

Additional information

Funding

The laboratory CHEMBIOPRO financed this work from its own funds.