Essential oils and volatiles: sample preparation and analysis. A review.

This article is a short overview of the state of the art in essential oil analysis. Several aspects of the analysis of essential oils and volatile fraction of vegetable matrices are here critically discussed. The following topics are dealt with: steam distillation, hydrodistillation and headspace sampling for sample preparation, and fast-GC, fast-GC-qMS analysis, enantioselective GC, multidimensional GC techniques and GC-isotopic ratio mass spectrometry (GC-IRMS) for analysis and quantitation. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.