Analysis Of Volatile Compounds From Curcuma By Flash Evaporation-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry

Curcuma including Curcuma zedoaria Rosc.,Curcuma aromatiea Salisb.and Curcuma longa L.belongs to the Zingiberaceae family,commonly found in subtropical and temperate regions such as southeast Asia and China.The volatile oil of Curcuma, which has been used as the basis of its quality evaluation,possess pharmacological activities such as anticancer,antimicrobial,antivirus and enhance immune.Therefore,it is necessary to develop a rapid,convenient and accurate method to analyze the volatile oil of Curcuma for its quality control.In this paper,a flash evaporation followed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry(FE-GC-MS) for the analysis of the volatile compounds from Curcuma wenyujin Y.H Chen et C.Ling,one kind of the Curcuma zedoaria Rose.,is described. FE parameters including FE temperature,sample mass and particle size of sample were optimized.And more than 60 compounds on the chromatogram were obtained when 200℃as FE temperature,0.4 mg of sample amount with 120 mesh were selected.The comparison of FE,steam distillation(SD) and headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) was carried out.The total of 40,38 and 36 compounds were assigned in FE, SD and HS-SPME,respectively,by MS combined with retention indices(RI).The relative peak areas of five active constituents(curzerene,curcumol,β-elemenone, germacrone,curdione) obtained by FE were similar to those obtained by SD and HS-SPME. Then,based on the relative peak areas of 35 peaks in the chromatograms obtained by FE-GC,9 Curcuma zedoaria Rosc.samples from 3 different origins were clearly classfied into 3 categories by two pattern recognition methods,i.e.principle component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis.Furthermore,FE-GC-MS was applied to analyze the volatile compounds from Curcuma longa L.and Curcuma aromatica Salisb.The comparison of the volatile compounds from Curcuma zedoaria Rosc.,Curcuma aromatica Salisb.and Curcuma longa L.was carried out.The results shows the volatile components in Curcuma zedoaria Rosc.are fairly similar to those in Curcuma aromatica Salisb.,and are quite different with those in Curcuma longa L.Thus,the results proved that FE-GC-MS is a rapid,convenient,sensitive and solvent-free method suitable for the analysis of volatile compounds from Curcuma,with using much less amount of sample.