Relevance of the Sea Sand Disruption Method (SSDM) for the Biometrical Differentiation of the Essential‐Oil Composition from Conifers

Sea Sand Disruption Method (SSDM) is a simple and cheap sample‐preparation procedure allowing the reduction of organic solvent consumption, exclusion of sample component degradation, improvement of extraction efficiency and selectivity, and elimination of additional sample clean‐up and pre‐concentration step before chromatographic analysis. This article deals with the possibility of SSDM application for the differentiation of essential‐oils components occurring in the Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) and cypress (Cupressus sempervirens L.) needles from Madrid (Spain), Laganas (Zakhyntos, Greece), Cala Morell (Menorca, Spain), Lublin (Poland), Helsinki (Finland), and Oradea (Romania). The SSDM results are related to the analogous – obtained applying two other sample preparation methods – steam distillation and Pressurized Liquid Extraction (PLE). The results presented established that the total amount and the composition of essential‐oil components revealed by SSDM are equivalent or higher than those obtained by one of the most effective extraction technique, PLE. Moreover, SSDM seems to provide the most representative profile of all essential‐oil components as no heat is applied. Thus, this environmentally friendly method is suggested to be used as the main extraction procedure for the differentiation of essential‐oil components in conifers for scientific and industrial purposes.