Recent Advances in Analysis of Essential Oils

This review provides an overview of the emerging trends in analysis of essential oils and indicates future trends. Since early human history the essential oils have been used in folk medicine, food and cosmetic industries in various parts of the world. GC-FID is the traditional method for essential oils quantification while GC-MS is the most common analytical method for qualitative analysis. Chiral GC allowed the identification of a great number of chiral essential oil constituents. An alternative to GC analysis is HPLC chromatography. The use of hyphenated techniques, such as LC-MS-MS provides important information about the structure of essential oils constituents. However, only a comparatively small number of reports on essential oil analyses by HPLC can be found in the literature. Multidimensional chromatography is an approach capable of providing greater resolution.13C-NMR spectroscopy is a complementary tool for analysis of essential oils. Advantage of this method compared to mass spectrometry is identification of stereoisomers and thermally unstable compounds while its disadvantage is inability to identify the minor oils constituents. 1H-NMR as an online tool for GC analysis showed promising results but requires further research to be applied on the analysis of essential oils. The range of information obtained from essential oils analysis enables the application of chemometrics.