Phytochemical study of essential oil from Ocotea quixos (Lam.) Kosterm. (ISHPINGO)

Abstract

This investigation was carried out with a sample of leaves and chalices of Ocotea quixos (Lam.) Kosterm., Collected in Archidona, province of Napo, Ecuador. Although the bibliography reports to the chalices of the tree as the part of the vegetable traditionally used for the extraction of the essential oil, there are no data regarding the chemical composition of the essential oil extracted from the leaves. The objective of this work was to extract the essential oil from leaves and chalices for a comparative study of its physical properties, chemical composition and antimicrobial properties. The residual moisture content in leaves and calyxes was 8 and 12 % respectively. The results of the phytochemical screening performed on the aqueous and alcoholic extracts of the leaves and chalices allowed to identify saponins, reducing sugars, phenols and tannins, and flavonoids. The extraction of the essential oil was done by hydrodistillation, the yield was 1.24 % in chalices after 2 hours of distillation and in the case of leaves of 0.88 %. Analysis by gas chromatography of the calyx essential oil revealed the presence of two important peaks with retention times of 12.213 and 13.718 minutes; while in the essential oil of the leaves were also observed two important peaks with a slight variation in their retention times: 12.117 and 13.677 minutes, it was assumed that from the qualitative point of view, the two parts of the plant material analyzed present a very similar composition.