Current and Potential Use of Citrus Essential Oils

Since the Middle Ages, citrus essential oils (EOs) have been widely used for their bactericidal, virucidal, fungicidal, antiparasitical, insecticidal, medicinal and cosmetic proprieties. Also nowadays, they find important applications in pharmaceutical, sanitary, cosmetic, agricultural and food industries. The best method to extract EOs from citrus plant tissue is steam distillation because of a variety of extracted volatile molecules such as terpenes and terpenoids, phenol-derived aromatic components and aliphatic components. In vitro physicochemical assays classify most of them as antioxidants.