Essential oils from Anthemis maritima flowers: infraspecific variability along the Adriatic coast (Italy)

The hydrodistilled essential oils from flowers of five Adriatic populations of Anthemis maritima were analysed by GC-FID and GC/MS. Anthemis maritima is a psammophilous plant living generally on coastal sand dunes but occasionally on sea cliffs and shingle beaches. 163 chemical compounds were identified in total, accounting for 90.5% of the oils. The main classes of compounds represented in the essential oils were monoterpene hydrocarbons, oxygenated monoterpenes, sesquiterpene hydrocarbons, oxygenated sesquiterpenes and terpene esters. In particular, cluster analysis and principal coordinate analysis, the multivariate chemometric techniques used to classify the samples, highlighted three different chemotypes linked to a geographic origin. One group living in Northern Italy was characterised by the highest content of -pinene, -terpinene and -caryophyllene, a second chemotype was in Central Italy with the highest amount of trans-chrysanthenyl acetate and a third group living in Southern Italy with a more heterogeneous volatile profile was characterised by the highest values of cis-chrysanthenyl acetate, trans-chrysanthenyl isobutyrate, cis-carveol propionate, -zingiberene and cubenol. Moreover, the comparison of the Adriatic populations with the Tyrrhenian samples, analysed in a previous research, showed that cubenol (absent in all the Tyrrhenian populations) and (E)--farnesene (absent in all the Adriatic samples) play a crucial role in discriminating the Italian populations.