A Comparative Study of Chemical Constituents and Antimicrobial Activity of Essential Oil of Litchi chinensis Growing in Different Geographical Areas of India

Dietary supplements derived from plants gaining importance in recent years for development of antimicrobial agents due to their lesser side effects and easy availability. The present study consists of comparative study of essential oil components and their antimicrobial activity against human pathogenic bacteria collected from three different geographical areas of India: Baddi (Himachal Pradesh), Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh), and Bangalore (Karnataka), coded as LC-1, LC-2, and LC-3, respectively. Evaluation of chemical constituents of essential oil by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) were performed. We identified seventeen compounds, representing 85.19-88.52 % of the oil under study. The identified sesquiterpene hydrocarbons are in essential oil, with 63.92-70.18 %, oxygenated sesquiterpens with 15.68-22.93 %, fatty acid with 0.01-0.51 % and aldehyde with 0.01-0.02 % of the total percentage identified. The major constituents were sesquiterpene hydrocarbon (70.18 %) found in essential oil collected from Lucknow, (India). Remarkable difference in content of essential oil and their antimicrobial activity were noticed collected from three different locations of India. Antibacterial activity of the tested oil revealed the highest antibacterial porential was produced by Litchi chinensis oil collected from Lucknow (30 +/- 0.01) on S. pyrogens.