Chemical Characterization of Marrubium vulgare Volatiles from Serbia

Marrubium vulgare is a cosmopolitan medicinal plant from the Lamiaceae family, which produces structurally highly diverse groups of secondary metabolites. A total of 160 compounds were determined in the volatiles from Serbia during two investigated years (2019 and 2020). The main components were E-caryophyllene, followed by germacrene D, alpha-humulene and alpha-copaene. All these compounds are from sesquiterpene hydrocarbons class which was dominant in both investigated years. This variation in volatiles composition could be a consequence of weather conditions, as in the case of other aromatic plants. According to the unrooted cluster tree with 37 samples of Marrubium sp. volatiles from literature and average values from this study, it could be said that there are several chemotypes: E-caryophyllene, beta-bisabolene, alpha-pinene, beta-farnesene, E-caryophyllene + caryophyllene oxide chemotype, and diverse (unclassified) chemotypes. However, occurring polymorphism could be consequence of adaptation to grow in different environment, especially ecological conditions such as humidity, temperature and altitude, as well as hybridization strongly affected the chemotypes. In addition, this paper aimed to obtain validated models for prediction of retention indices (RIs) of compounds isolated from M. vulgare volatiles. A total of 160 experimentally obtained RIs of volatile compounds was used to build the prediction models. The coefficients of determination were 0.956 and 0.964, demonstrating that these models could be used for predicting RIs, due to low prediction error and high r(2).

Automated summary

The study identified 160 volatile compounds produced by Marrubium vulgare, with main components including E-caryophyllene from the sesquiterpene hydrocarbons class. The variation in volatile composition may be attributed to weather conditions, while different chemical types could be a result of adaptation to different growth environments.