Constituents of the essential oil of cnidium officinale Makino, a Korean medicinal plant

The volatile flavour constituents of chunkung (Cnidium officinale Makino), isolated by simultaneous steam distillation-extraction, were investigated by capillary GC and GC-MS. Chunkung is a perennial plant of the Family Umbelliferae. This plant is characterized by its conspicuous oriental flavour and contains a copious amount of phthalides in the essential oil. Chunkung is one of the important folk medicines for counteracting a variety of diseases, and is particularly used as a traditional oriental medicine in the treatment of female genital inflammatory diseases. Sixty-eight volatile flavour constituents, which make up 95.7% of the total volatile content of the oil, were detected in chunkung essential oil, which contained 25 hydrocarbons (15.9%), eight aldehydes (0.7%), 13 alcohols (11.5%), three ketones (0.5%), nine esters (1.4%), three oxides (0.4%), one acid (trace), five phthalides (64.8%) and one miscellaneous component (0.1%). cis-Butylidene phthalide (33.2%) was the most abundant component followed by 3-butyl phthalide (21.1%), cis-3-isobutylidene phthalide (10.1%) and terpinen-4-ol (8.5%). Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.