Chapter 9: Volatile Components of Plants, Essential Oils, and Fragrances

The 20 billion dollar industry that produces the familiar flavours and fragrances that surround us in everyday life relies heavily on separation science. Indeed,the relationship between essential oil analysis and gaschromatography (GC) began within a few years of James and Martinfirst describing the technique [2]. Gaschromatography, particularly when combined with mass spectrometry (MS) has strongly contributed to the development of the science of essential oils and fragrances in the areas of phytochemistry, chemotaxonomy, olfactory research, biochemistry, plant-insect research, the search for new sources of odoriferous compounds for industry, and quality control. Today thousands of flavour and fragrance compounds derived from plant materials have been characterised,but the need to perform basic work on the chemical composition of essential oils and fragrances still exists and there is growing interest in the use of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography(GC GC) for these analyses.