Quality Control Assays of Essential Oils Using Benchtop NMR Spectroscopy: Quantification of Key Terpenes, Terpenoids,...

NMR spectroscopy has been widely used for the identification and structural elucidation of key components found in essential oils. For many years, the combination of NMR spectroscopy with other analytical techniques, such as gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry (MS), has allowed researchers to identify and quantify a wide variety of terpenes, terpenoids, aldehydes, and other very low-level components present in various essential oils. Importantly, however, whereas GC continues to be the most widely used technique for the quantification of these components, NMR spectroscopy is still mostly reserved for structural elucidation purposes. In this work, we demonstrate how benchtop NMR spectroscopy can also be used for the quantification of key species in various essential oils, increasing accessibility to this technique by decreasing the costs associated with traditional high-field NMR instrumentation and lowering the expertise barriers required for accessing this technique.