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Alexis St-Gelais – Research Note

PhytoChemia is an uncommon business. We launched the company while still completing our master degrees, which meant we were knee deep in fundamental research in chemistry. One of the motivations – especially for me – of setting up our laboratory was to have our very own scientific playground. As chemists, we feel that an important part of our job is to participate to the human quest for knowledge, if only humbly. This is why we always keep a small research project or two going on, and intend to publish our results in peer-reviewed papers, with collaborations whenever possible.

This happened for the first time this week, with the release of Aromas from Quebec. III. Composition of the essential oil and hydrolate of the roots of Anthriscus sylvestris (L.) Hoffm. from Saguenay* in the Journal of Essential Oil Research. This paper adresses the volatile constituents from a weedy species that has been introduced over a century ago in North America for Europe, wild chervil (Figure 1).

cow_parsley_anthriscus_sylvestris_-_geograph-org-uk_-_1300394
Figure 1. Wild chervil colony in the United Kingdom.
The plant is found in dense groups in various habitats,
such as stream banks, well-lighted copses,  uncultivated
fields and so on, where it sometimes grows agressively
at the expense of the local flora.

As mentionned earlier on these pages, we sometimes stroll in the wild in quest for interesting scents. Back in the summer of 2013, when PhytoChemia was a few months old, I stumbled on a dense colony of wild chervil. The plant itself is rather impressive, reaching about 5 feet high, and doing so very quickly in order to outgrow any competing species. By now, around here the plant is already lush with near-ripe seeds, and will likely dry out within two weeks, having completed its life cycle only halfway through our summer.

There was a faint scent to the leaves and the stem. Out of curiosity, I pulled a root, to discover it pretty much looked like a beige carrot, sometimes reaching a considerable size. It also had a pleasant scent, somewhat reminding that of the orange vegetable (which is not so surprising, since both plants belong to the same family, the Apiaceae). For fun, I thus extracted a root with hexane and gave it a quick check on GC. I then noticed that the profile was rather different from that of the only report for Anthriscus sylvestris oil by Bos et al. in The Netherlands [1]. The project was born.

We ran a small-scale hydrodiffusion study on several colonies, with three of them being collected in sufficient amount to collect enough pure essential oils for GC analyses. Not only did we observe that the terpenic composition of the oil differed from those reported in Europe, but we also found out that the colonies also were quite distinct.

This first paper deals with those analyses, casting a new light on the fact that wild chervil likely exhibits chemotypes. As far as the main molecules are concerned, it would seem that this species produces oils that can be rich or poor iβ-phellandrene and myrcene, and exhibit an on/off behavior for the biosynthesis of trans-sabinyl acetate. The study also revealed the presence of some molecules that were previously unknown in wild chervil, such as the polyyne (Z)-falcarinol or the phenylpropanoid elemicin, which are often encountered in Apiaceae.

This is not the end of the road for us. With this study at hand, we have a firm ground for the analysis of much more wild chervil essential oils. This summer, we have started collecting hundreds of individual samples in order to establish wild chervil chemotypes on a statistical basis in our region. In the long run, we hope to be able to run a pilot-scale extraction with a local distillation facility on a well-chemotyped colony, and perhaps open the way for a possible added value for this invasive weed.

Reference

[1] R. Bos, A. Koulman, H. Woerdenbag, W.J. Quax and N. Pras, Volatile components from Anthriscus sylvestris (L.) Hoffm. J. Chromatogr. A, 966, 233–238 (2002).

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