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Agarwood is a resin saturated heartwood producing its ownessential oil. This oil comprises of a complex mixture of chromone derivatives, oxygenated sesquiterpenes and sesquiterpene hydrocarbons. This mixture has a heavy woody scentand is one of the contributors to the Agarwood oil quality. In this paper, a study that focuses on the approach to select the substantial chemical compounds for Agarwood quality grading was carried out. GC-MS analysis was used to extract the chemical compounds from the Agarwood oil. The data were then preprocessed using techniques such as missing values ratio, natural logarithm and min. max. normalization. Next, synthetic data were generated using MUNGE to fulfil the passing condition of sampling adequacy test. To determine the substantial compounds, PCA and Pearson’s correlation were used. This approach was successful in determining three substantial compounds namely β-agarofuran, αagarofuran and 10-epi-γ-eudesmol. These substantial chemical compounds will be used later to predict the quality of Agarwood oil.

This paper presents the application of Solid Phase Micro Extraction (SPME) coupled with Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) and Gas Chromatography-Flame Ionization Detector (GC-FID) to charaterize agarwood incense. The work involved three types of SPME fibres at 30 minutes sampling time. The fibres are 50/30 µm divinylbenzene-carboxen­polydimethysiloxane (DVB-CAR-PDMS), 65 µm polydi methylsiloxane­divinylbenzene (PDMS-DVB) and 85 µm carboxen-polydimethyl siloxane (CAR-PDMS). The results showed that among many compounds extracted by GC-MS coupled with SPME, six compounds were found significantly presence in high quality aganvood incense due to their high percentage area (%). They are beta-maaliene, alpha-elemol, beta-selinene, 10-epi-gamma-eudesmol, agarospirol and caryophellene oxide. The finding offers a new approach for establishing the volatile profile of agarwood incense components which is beneficial for agarwood grading and discrimination.