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Terpenes in Impinger Extracts of Kryptonite and Blueberry Strains of Medical Cannabis
Monday, March 17th, 2014 by
Jack Cochran
As noted in my earlier post,
Terpenes in Medical Cannabis
, terpenes are an important class of aroma compounds that may
contribute to the medicinal benefits of cannabis, via the so-called “
entourage effect
”. I profiled some of the terpenes listed as
important for medical cannabis using our
30m x 0.25mm x 1.40µm Rxi-624Sil MS
, achieving a promising separation on a
standard I put together. Shown below are some impinger extracts provided by
SRI Instruments
for Kryptonite and Blueberry
strains of medical cannabis. Importantly, these extracts do NOT contain any cannabinoids, which would elute late, if at all,
from the thick-film 624Sil MS column, nor do they contain chlorophyll, another compound that plays havoc with GC inlet
liners and stationary phases. Part of the beauty of headspace extraction techniques for terpenes is leaving the involatile
material behind, and in this case, compressed air was used to sweep the terpenes from the cannabis to a vial containing
methanol for trapping the terpenes.
As you look at the chromatograms below, it is important to note that this is ONLY qualitative work at this point and that
different headspace methods (e.g. purge-and-trap, static headspace, SPME, etc.) could yield much different chromatograms.
Solvent extraction or steam distillation, would likely be even more different, including resulting in more intense peaks for later
eluting (less volatile) terpenes. The point of this work is to show initial efforts to characterize chromatographic elution order
for some medical marijuana terpenes and analyze the first “real world” samples to show how terpene profiles for different
medicines can be dissimilar.
Take a look back on the
GCxGC-TOFMS work
that shows very nice multidimensional separations of terpenes, sesquiterpenes,
and oxygenated terpenes in a solvent extract for cannabis.
Restek continues to support the medical cannabis analysis community with GC and LC columns, accessories, and reference
materials. Check out our
Medical Marijuana web page
.
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