Chemical Composition and Biological Activity of the Essential Oil from Rhododendron anwheiense Flowers.

The plant essential oil, which is rather simply isolated from plants, possesses broad spectra of biological activity, and is turned into agents that are widely used in medicine, is one of the main medicinal components of the genus I Rhododendron i . According to the literature, alkanes were also found to be dominant components and the contents of phytol and hexadecanoic acid were somewhat high in the essential oil from the flowers of I Rhododendron mucronatum i G. Don and I R. simii i Planch [[17]]. The antioxidant activity of the oil was evaluated by its metal chelating ability and scavenging activity against DPPH free radical, ATBS free radical, and superoxide anion free radical. Therefore, the oil showed significant antioxidant capacity, which may be attributed to present unsaturated terpenes and their oxygenated derivatives generally considered to have potent antioxidant activity abundantly into oil. [Extracted from the article]