GC-MS CHEMICAL PROFILING OF HEAVY OIL DERIVED FROM COMMERCIAL VARIETY OF OMAN’S FRANKINCENSE AND THEIR ANTI MICROBIAL ACTIVITY
Frankincense has long ailment curing history. Local people in Oman often using frankincense resin for fragrance purpose and some varieties are edible. These edible varieties reduce the size of teratomas and some tumors but there is no scientific evidence existing for such practice. Noticeably essential oil extracted from frankincense resin by hydro-distillation (HD) method reported has enormous biological activities such as antioxidant, anti-cancer, anti-analgesic etc. Gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS) chemical profiling of this essential oil revealed that the major content is α-pinene and it is associated with other triterpenes. In this study we tried to establish soxhlet extraction procedure to isolate active molecules from commercial variety of Oman’s frankincense and to reveal their chemical profiling and its anti microbial property because this variety mainly used for fragrance purpose. Inhaling frankincense fragrance has number of positive biological activities. Recent report states that frankincense fragrance enriched with α-pinene reduce the tumor growth in animal model (Ref). Our GCMS data reveal that α-pinene (48.8%) is major component in our heavy oil followed by α-amyrin (19.5%), γ-elemene (7.4%), β-amyrin (6.9%), delta-limonene (3.84%), and β-phellandrene (1.53%). It is well known that soxhlet extraction procedure is very common to obtain high yield of phytochemicals from the plant or microbial sources and it is very simple, feasible and efficient extraction method. In this study for the first time we define the soxhlet extraction based protocol to extract heavy triterpenes from commercial variety Oman’s frankincense and we tested them for antimicrobial activity against different pathogens (E.coli, klebsiella, staphylococcus and bacillus)