Published Paper Details:

Essential oils are fragrant concentrated extracts from plants that are very volatile and have a wide range of applications. In this study, chemometric approaches were integrated with quick, easy-to-use attenuated total reflection Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) to validate essential oils' taxonomy and purity. Based on plant botanical family and concentration, principal component analysis (PCA) divided 30 essential oil samples into three categories. The first group had highly concentrated Asteraceae oils, the second group contained highly concentrated Lamiaceae oils, and the third group contained three highly concentrated essential oils from various botanical families as well as commercial-grade essential oils. Despite their comparable spectral patterns or botanical family, commercial-grade oil samples did not cluster with the matching concentrated oil samples. The most important spectral bands that can be utilized as marker bands for discriminating between distinct botanical plant family groupings are infrared (IR) bands that correspond to carbonyl, vinyl, methyl, and methylene group vibrations, according to a loading plot. The results of PCA were confirmed by hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). ATR-FTIR spectroscopy paired with chemometric algorithms provides a non-destructive and direct method for chemotaxonomic classification and purity assessment of medicinal and aromatic essential oils.