Use of solid-phase microextraction as a sampling technique for the characterization of volatile compounds emitted from Chinese daffodil flowers

Headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) has been applied to the determination of volatile compounds emitted from living daffodil flowers. The SPME conditions were optimized and applied to headspace extraction of the volatile compounds. The volatile compounds adsorbed on the fiber were desorbed and analyzed by GC-MS. We identified 27 compounds in the flower emission, which mainly included acetic acid phenethyl ester (31.68%), E-ocimene (17.15%), acetic acid benzyl ester (11.53%), neo-allo-ocimene (6.94%), allo-ocimene(5.34%), alpha-linalool (5.26%), 1,8-cineole(3.70%), benzenepropyl acetate (1.98%), and 3-methyl-2-buten-1-ol acetate(1.88%). The volatile compounds emitted by the flower excised from the daffodil were also analyzed by the present method, and the results showed that n-pentadecane, n-hexadecane, n-octadecane, and acetic acid phenethyl ester might be biomarker compounds of living, daffodil flowers. To our knowledge, this is the first report on the volatile compounds emitted from Chinese daffodil flowers.