Essential Oil Profiles of Some Nigerian Medicinal Plants

The paper reports on the compounds identified from the essential oils of Peperomia pellucida (L.) Kunth. (Piperaceae), Laggera aurita (L.f.) Sch. Bip. ex C.B. Clarke (Asteraceae), Crateva religiosa Forst. f. (Capparaceae) and Passiflora foetida L. (Passifloraceae). The oils were obtained by separate hydrodistillation procedures and analyzed for their constituents by means of GC and GC-MS. The seventy-four oil constituents of P. pellucida had dill-apiole (38.6 %), bicyclogermacrene (10.7 %), germacrene D (9.6 %) and beta-chamigrene (8.3 %) in abundance. The phenol ether-p-2, 5-dimethoxy cymene (66.5 %) was the most singly abundance of the twenty-nine constituent of L. aurita. Terpenes are less common. In the forty-three identified oil constituents of C. religiosa were present linalool (30.2 %) and nonanal (17.2 %) as dominant compounds while P. foetida had hexahydrofarnesylacetone (15.2 %) occurring above 10 % among the seventy-six constituents detected so far. The other constituents that could be identified in sizeable amounts are P-eudesmol (6.5 %), germacrene D, caryophyllene oxide and beta-cedrene (ca.5.0 %). The volatile oil constituents of C religiosa and P. foelida are probably being reported for the first time.