LOW TEMPERATURE PLANAR CHROMATOGRAPHY–DENSITOMETRY AND GAS CHROMATOGRAPHY OF ESSENTIAL OILS FROM DIFFERENT SAGE (SALVIA) SPECIES

Essential oils of plant origin are the multicomponent mixtures of mono-, di-, tri-, and sesquiterpenes. Due to their recognized curative, cosmetic, and nutritional properties on the one hand and an outstanding modern analytical potential on the other, qualitative and quantitative composition of essential oils currently is in the focus of interest for phytochemistry and pharmacognosy. Due to the recognized volatility of the essential oil components, in their case the analytical method of choice is gas chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (GC-MS). However, great versatility of planar chromatography has resulted in a number of successful applications of this relatively simple and inexpensive separation technique to the investigations on composition of the volatile plant constituents as well. Generally, the low temperature preparative layer chromatography (PLC) is used for preliminary fractionation of the essential oils, and the separated fractions are further analyzed by means of GC-MS. In this s...