Study of Ethanol Presence in Some Ornamental and Aromatic Plants Using Gas Chromatography

Plants re-emit a substantial fraction of their assimilated carbon into the atmosphere as biogenic volatile organic compound. According to the presence of relatively high amount of methanol in herbal distillates, finding different concentrations of ethanol in such drinks is expectable, as several studies appeared that produced ethanol by plants emits into the atmosphere as do methanol. In this study, ethanol content of 30 industrial herbal distillates made by three different companies was measured. For this purpose, some solutions with concentration of 10000 mgL-1 were prepared from ethanol and methanol separately as original and internal standard sources that in continue, different concentrations of standards were prepared from ethanol solution and after it, 50 µL methanol solution was added to all of the standards and samples as internal standard and then, all of them were examined with GC. The obtained results indicated that some of the herbal distillates contain ethanol. Maximum and minimum amount of ethanol existed in Rosa damascena L., (rose water) with mean value 96.4 mgL-1 and Salix aegyptiaca L., distillate (only one sample had 15.5 mgL-1 and in two other samples were not seen) respectively, while most of the examined samples had no ethanol. Presence of ethanol in some of the examined samples showed that further study is necessary to achieve correct information about this subject.