Steam distillation produces essential oils, which are made up of volatile, typically fragrant chemicals. Extracts are made by immersing plant matter in a solvent and are commonly stated to include polyphenols, anthraquinones, flavonoids, and other chemicals. However, the majority of papers fail to specify if the extracted extracts include the volatile components present in essential oils.Will extracts include volatile essential oil components, or can they only be extracted from plant debris by steam distillation?
Extract does contain volatile compounds, too. All volatile compounds are dissolvable in either water, ethanol, methanol ... Thus, they are extracted. However, due to the presence of high amount of other compounds, the volatile compounds' percentage is low
There are traces of volatile compounds in the extracted extracts but in low quantity.
It is difficult because essential oils are volatile and the extraction method is different (hydrodistillation) compared to that used to obtain plant extracts which is generally done by maceration and with various organic solvents (ethanol, methanol, etc.) or water.
Definitely yes, organic extracts do contain volatile components
but they are present in relatively low or very low amounts
compared to the remaining non-volatile components of the plant
(flavonoids, various types of phenolics, triterpenoids,
diterpenoids, sterols, lipids, waxes, glycosides, etc) . Also,
keep in mind that essential oils are generally a complex blend
where most of the components make up less than 1% of the
essential oil. In this context, the level of most essential oil
components in the total extract of a plant is extremely low and
hardly detectable.
For its part, steam distillation is a procedure that allows
obtaining only volatile components which can be quickly analyzed
by GC-MS, an extremely sensitive instrument
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Phytochemistry
- Extracts