ABSTRACT
Plants are defined as the ‘Solar powered Phytochemical factory’ for synthesizing a myriad metabolites, both primary and secondary. The essential oils, being secondary metabolites, are made up of very diverse molecular assemblies with ‘Chemical polymorphism’. In the literature and in most cases, only the major constituents of essential oils have been considered for the Chemotype determination. However, it is worth noting that minor compounds can play a very important role in establishing antibacterial activity of a given species.
This study was designed to put the chromatographic data of Lemongrass, Palmarosa and Citronella oil in one basket with their observed antibacterial activity, from which the abundance (in %) of essential oil components was inferred. From ‘Components Abundance ’ analysis (followed by a t- test of all components of essential oils available in database, a chemotype of entity respective essential oils were defined. There were varied opinion with respect to the presence of Limonene, Citronellol and Linalool as observed from the t-test. There was existence of a significant difference in the opinion with respect to the presence of Limonene, Citronellol, Linalool and Caryophyllene in Lemongrass, Palmarosa, and Citronella oils, as the significance value was less than 0.05 at 99% confidence level.
Further, in silico based docking simulation studies were carried out between the above mentioned components of essential oils with DNA gyrase, a molecular target using molecular docking tools. It was observed that there was no correlation between abundance (%) of components and respective molecular interaction aptitude of each active constituents considered for this study.
