Gas purge micro solvent extraction: A rapid and powerful tool for essential oil chromatographic fingerprints.

• Gas purge micro solvent extraction method was applied for the first time to obtain essential oil fingerprints from plants. • Broad spectrum information on volatile and semi-volatile fraction of medicinal plant was obtained. • The proposed method allows better extraction performances for semi-volatile compounds respect to classical steam distillation. • Atractylodes japonica , Atractylodes lancea , and Atractylodes macrocephal essential oils were characterized and compared. In this work, a new an innovative micro liquid extraction technique named "gas purge micro solvent extraction" (GP-MSE) have been tested, hyphenated with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS), to evaluate its capability to extract volatile fractions from vegetal samples respect to classical steam distillation extraction procedure, by comparing essential oil fingerprints from three different Atractylodes species. GP-MSE showed higher extraction capabilities and sensitivities (in particular for semi-volatile components), obtaining more structured essential oil fingerprints with high reliabilities (relative standard deviation of the peak areas between 0.34% and 5.83%), requiring at the same time smaller sample amounts and reduced extraction times. Essential oil profile data were also submitted to principal component analysis and included cosine angle in order to highlight differences among the Atractylodes species under investigation. GP-MSE can be considered an alternative, simple, fast, sensitive and environmentally friendly extraction method, with high extraction efficiencies and reproducibility toward both volatile and semi-volatile compounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]