Chemotaxonomy of mints of genus Mentha by applying Raman spectroscopy

The characterization of mints is often problematic because Mentha is a taxonomically complex genus. In order to provide a fast and easy characterization method, we use a combination of micro-Raman spectroscopy and hierarchical cluster analysis. A classification trial of different mint taxa is possible for one collection time. For spectra measured at different points during the growing season, a more sophisticated pretreatment of the data is necessary to receive good discrimination between the species, as well as between the subspecies and varieties of the mints. (C) 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.