[Quality assessment of commercial rosemary based on liquid/gas chromatography and mass spectrography with...

A GC-MS fingerprint of rosemary oil and an UPLC fingerprint of non-volatile compounds of rosemary were established. Sixty-three kinds of volatile compounds and thirty-eight kinds of non-volatile compounds were identified tentatively using GC-MS and UPLC-Q-TOF-MS, respectively, and most of them are flavonoids, oxygenated monoterpenes, and diterpenoids, etc. According to multivariate data analysis, chemical differences existed among commercial rosemary samples, for example, the essential oil of imported rosemary sample belongs to Morocco/Tunisian type and the one of domestic sample belongs to Spanish type. The results of principal components analysis and partial least squares discriminant analysis showed that the imported and domestic rosemary samples were classified into two groups and fourteen components including eucalyptol, (+)-α-pinene, and carnosic acid, were found as the discrimination markers. In comparison with imported rosemary, it can be found that the contents of ten markers such as (+)-α-pinene, o-cymene, and carnosic acid were higher, nonetheless, lower contents for the other markers, in those domestic rosemary samples. Moreover, rosmarinic acid, an important bioactive component in rosemary extract, extensively varied among different samples, indicating that the quality evaluation of rosemary should be concerned.