Rapid identification of volatile compounds in aromatic plants by automatic thermal desorption-GC-MS

Thermal desorption is a valuable method for the fractionation of plant volatile components, which can be carried out on-line with GC analysis. The use of coupled GC-MS affords additional qualitative information, of special interest for plant species whose composition has not been previously studied. Some examples of the application of automatic thermal desorption coupled to GC-MS to the identification and characterization of volatile components of plants of different families are given.