Chemical composition of the essential oil and isolation of two main constituents of Mentha pulegium L.

Aromatic and medicinal plants are the reservoirs of a vast quantity of molecules with different activities. Pennyroyal or Mentha pulegium L. is one of the miraculous plants that is very rich in aromatic essence and mostly used for their medicinal virtues. The purpose of the present work is to determine the chemical composition of the essential oil of the flowering tops of pennyroyal, which were harvested during July 2017 in M’Rirt (Middle-Atlas, Morocco), and to separate its constituents. The analysis of the essential oil, extracted by hydrodistillation, was made using gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC/MS). The results of this analysis showed that the essential oil of pennyroyal contains two main compounds: pulegone and piperitenone with a rate of 71.97 and 26.04%, respectively. These two molecules represent 98.01% of the identified products. Subsequently, this essence was split on the open column of silica using an elected official of growing polarity in order to isolate certain compounds. Two main constituents were isolated and identified by the analysis of their spectroscopic data. © The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Society for Plant Research 2023.