A comparative study on chemical constituents of essential oils from different populations of Achillea biebersteinii Afan. growing wild in khorasan using multivariate statistical analyses

Achillea biebersteinii Afan. is a member of Asteraceae and occurs wild in different parts of the world including Europe, Turkey, Iran and central Asia. In addition to traditional medicine, the plant is also considered in modern medicine and different industries because of its essential oil characteristics. The present study was conducted to investigate the essential oil content and composition of nine populations of A. biebersteinii collected from different ports of Khorassan Province. For this purpose, after calculating essential oil content of each population with three independent experiments, chemical constituents of oils were identified by means of GC and GC-MS analyses. The results showed that Golool (1.62%) and Chelmir (1.60%) contained the highest amount of essential oil. Totally, 23 components were characterized in the essential oil of all populations with oxygenated monoterpens (47.9-73.1%) as the principle fraction. While 1,8-cineole, nepetalactone, p-cymene, -terpinene and cis-chrysanthenyl acetate were identified as the prevalent constituents of all investigated essential oils, lavandulyl 2-methyl butyrate and cis-chrysanthenol were the rarest ones. Due to the high content of essential oil and high levels of 1,8-cineole, nepetalactone derivatives and p-cymene which are well-known biologically active compounds, Golool and Azghad populations seem to be suitable for application in relevant industries.