This review is a comprehensive introduction to pertinent aspects of the extraction methodology, chemistry, analysis and pharmacology of essential oils, whilst providing a background of general organic chemistry concepts to readers from non-chemistry oriented backgrounds. Furthermore, it describes the historical aspects of essential oil research whilst exploring contentious issues of terminology...

A new, sensitive and selective high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometric method has been developed for the determination of six major flavonoids including sophoricoside, genistin, genistein, rutin, quercetin, kaempferol in Fructus sophorae. Principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis were used to classify and differentiate these samples. Chromatograp...

Terpenoid resin is produced by all families and most genera of the order Coniferales (the conifers), and the distribution of terpenes present in most conifer resins is characteristic of the originating family. Analyses of early Cretaceous (Barremian) amber (fossil resin) from the English Wealden, Isle of Wight, southern England, by pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS), indi...

INTRODUCTION Plant volatiles (PVOCs) are important targets for studies in natural products, chemotaxonomy and biochemical ecology. The complexity of PVOC profiles often limits research to studies targeting only easily identified compounds. With the availability of mass spectral libraries and recent growth of retention index (RI) libraries, PVOC identification can be achieved using only gas chro...

An actinomycete, designated strain GIMN4.003(T), was isolated from seawater collected in Sanya, China. It produced white aerial mycelium and yellow substrate mycelium on Gause's synthetic agar medium no. 1. The substrate mycelium colour was not sensitive to pH. Scanning electron microscopy observations revealed that GIMN4.003(T) produced straight to flexuous spore chains of rough to warty spore...

A high-performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) fingerprint of Chinese Angelica (CA) was developed basing on the consistent chromatograms of 40 CA samples (Angelica sinensis (Oliv.) Diels). The unique properties of this HPLC fingerprints were validated by analyzing 13 related herbs including 4 Japanese Angelicae Root samples (JA, A. acutiloba Kitagawa and A. acutiloba Kitagawa var. sugiyame Hi...

Cissampelos capensis, commonly known by the Afrikaans name "dawidjies" or "dawidjieswortel", is the most important and best known medicinal plant of the family Menispermaceae used by the Khoisan and other rural people in the western region of South Africa. The main alkaloids in the leaves, stems and rhizomes were isolated and identified. Several of the main compounds were previously found in sp...

Physiological and chemotaxonomical studies were carried out on microorganisms isolated from a composter operated at around 50 to 60 degrees C. Only gram-positive rods were isolated and the microbial counts on agar plates were relatively low (10(3) to 10(5) cfu/g-sample). The chemotaxonomic properties of the ten isolates revealed that they were typical of the genus Bacillus. Identification by th...