The usual techniques applied for analyzing the chemical constitution of volatile oils, such as GC, GC-MS, Kovats Index and, in some cases, specialist computational systems, do not allow the identification of the unknown or biologically active compounds which must be isolated in order to have their molecular structures elucidated. This problem is higher if the oils present biological potential, which will induce in the isolation of active substances, once these substances must be obtained in their pure state to activity evaluation. Thus, this paper describes an unusual chromatographic separation (flash chromatography on SiO2 and SiO2/AgNO3) associated to spectrometric techniques (MS, ¹H NMR and 13C NMR), which lead to the purification and structural elucidation of the unpublished and/or biologically active constituents from volatile oils.
Volatile oil; chromatographic separation; spectrometric analysis