Constituents of the essential oil of Artemisia herba alba in Kashan area

Because of application of “Artemisia” in traditional medicine, many species of this genus have been surveyed by phytochemists and pharmacologists. On the other hand, many species in compositeae family have been found that have effective ingredients in medicinal projects. One of iranian species investigated previously is “Artemisia aucheri” which have six highly oxygenated monoterpenes. By using different methods such as gas chromatography, high performance liquid chromatography, couple of GC-MS spectrometery, infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, extraction, purification and identification were done. In “Artemisia absentium” ther are many reactive components that have a lot of properties such as digestive, carminative, antiromat, etc. Artemisinine (Qing hao su) is a sesquiterpene lactone from “Artemisia anua” which is used as anti-malaria. In this article, we decided to study about “Artemisia herba-alba” from Kashan area. By using hydro-distillation, the essential oil was taken, and then the important components of essential oil were identified by GC and GC-MS quantitatively and qualitatively. Among the components, comphor (42.5%), 1, 8-cineol (18.3%) and camphene (8.7%) were recognized.