Composition of the Essential Oil of Endemic Centaurea dursunbeyensis Uysal & Kose from Turkey

Abstract

Centaurea L. which is an important genus of Asteraceae (Compositae) family, is distributed with about its 700 species in Asia, North Africa, America and Europe. C. dursunbeyensis is a new endemic species from Turkey. In this study aerial parts of C. dursunbeyensis were hydrodistilled for 3 h using a Clevenger-type apparatus to produce a small amount of essential oil which was trapped in n-hexane. Identification of the essential oil components was carried out by comparison of their relative retention times with those of authentic samples or by comparison of their relative retention index (RRI) to the series of n-alkanes. Computer matching against commercial libraries and in-house “Baser Library of Essential Oil Constituents” built up by genuine compounds and components of known oils, as well as MS literature data, were used for the identification. Main constituents of the oil were found as hexadecanoic acid (32.4%), tetradecanoic acid (8.7%), nonacosane (5.5%), spathulenol (5.4%) and heneicosane (5.2%).