You have been able to prepare alcoholic extract from each plant, followed by evaporating the alcohol leaving a solid residue. You then kept each extract in a separate dark glass bottle. You forgot to label the samples. Describe a method to distinguish between these samples in order to identify each one’s name
Is there any chance to identify them by their smell? As far as I know, due to volatile compounds (predominantly phenolics), mentha and thyme have their specific scent and senna should be something like green tea or so.
I agree with the previous comments.
Yiu may also conduct H NMR on the crude extracts. You should be able to recognize the signals relative to marker compounds. Thymol for Thyme, menthol for Mentha and anthraquinones for Senna.
You can take small part of each plant materials e.g. 5-10 g. Extract again with ethanol (try to use least possible amount of ethanol) filter them and check TLC for each extracts and compare. You can easily recognize the extracts of each plants. You can also try 1H and 13C NMR to distinguish the extracts as rightly suggested by Prof. Alessandro Venditti.
All the best!!!
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