Gas chromatography of essential oil: State-of-the-art, recent advances, and perspectives

This review is an overview of the recent advances of gas chromatography in essential oil analysis; in particular, it focuses on both the new stationary phases and the advanced analytical methods and instrumentations. A paragraph is dedicated to ionic liquids as gas chromatography stationary phases, showing that, thanks to their peculiar selectivity, they can offer a complementary contribution to conventional stationary phases for the analysis of complex essential oils and the separation of critical pairs of components. Strategies to speed-up the analysis time, thus answering to the ever increasing request for routine essential oils quality control, are also discussed. Last but not least, a paragraph is dedicated to recent developments in column miniaturization in particular that based on microelectromechanical-system technology in a perspective of developing micro-gas chromatographic systems to optimize the energy consumption as well as the instrumentation dimensions. A number of applications in the essential oil field is also included.