Chemical composition and chemosystematic evaluation of the fruit and root headspace fractions of selected Heracleum taxa from southeastern Europe

This work is focused on nine Heracleum taxa (Apiaceae): H. sphondylium, sibiricum, montanum, ternatum, pyrenaicum subsp. pollinianum, orsinii and verticillatum, belonging to the sphondylium group, orphanidis, all from sect. Heracleum, as well austriacum siifolium Wendia. The aim was isolate headspace (HS) fractions 17 fruit samples (collected taxa) 13 root eight Heracleum), investigate their composition chemosystematic significance, compare these results with those previously obtained for essential oils isolated by hydrodistillation same samples. HS were using an automatic static sampler analysed GC-FID GC-MS. dominated octyl acetate and/or ?-pinene (the or n-octanol (H. austriacum), whereas mainly contained (Z)-?-ocimene group), n-nonane orphanidis). significance evaluated multivariate statistical methods: principal component analysis (PCA), non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) agglomerative hierarchical clustering based unweighted pair-group arithmetic average (UPGMA) algorithm. As in case of investigated oils, generally resulted grouping group representatives, within this morphologically related montanum position verticillatum. better separation (even compared previous oils), i.e. positions ternatum observed.