Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry Characterization of Vegetable Oil-Derived Potent Antimicrobial Agents.

Under a suitable thermal oxidation regime, vegetable oils yield a mixture of volatile and semivolatile organics that exhibit very high antimicrobial activities against a variety of microbial species. Volatile and semivolatile products were characterized with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) equipped with electron ionization (El) and chemical ionization (Cl) sources. The GC-MS results showed that the antimicrobial mixture comprised short and medium chain organic acids, aldehydes, and ketones, including propanal, butanal, hexanal, octanal, nonanal, propionic acid, hexanoic acid, heptanoic acid, and octanoic acid. Microbial exposure experiments showed that a short exposure period of less than 2 min was effective in killing vegetative bacterial cells with efficiencies as high as 109. The present report deals primarily with chemical characterization of the volatile and semivolatile organics with GC-MS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]