Distillation from Ginger | Research and innovation

Ginger Zingiber officinale

Ginger, whose latin name is Zingiber officinale wich in Sanskrit means ‘shaped like a deer antlers’ . It has a spicy yet sweet taste also it is widely found in East Asia, such as Malaysia. Ginger is originated from China , Nigeria and India . Ginger hydrosol can help to treat infections and digestive problems, due to its anti-bacterial and anti-microbial properties. [1]

Ginger, which is a rhizome plant, is known to have a very strong smell and is often used in our food for example when we prepare rice or any other sauce to give it a spicy edge and a sweet smell. Many people use it to make tea or herbal teas, grating or chopping it and mixing it with boiling water, and it goes well with lemon. Over the years, we've discovered that it's not only used for culinary purposes, but also has many therapeutic properties. When you're feeling sick to your stomach, drinking an infusion of ginger can help reduce heartburn. Studies show that ginger supplements are effective in reducing inflammation in the body, as well as helping with digestive problems. [2]

[1] = Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "ginger." Encyclopedia Britannica, May 29, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/plant/ginger.

[2] = Zingiber officinale Roscoe in Döring M (2022). English Wikipedia - Species Pages. Wikimedia Foundation. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/c3kkg

Nist web book : https//webbook.nist.gov/chemistry/

microwave extraction method

To make ginger hydrosol , we used microwave extraction method . To do this, we first grated about 300g of the plant. Normally, due to the ginger's moist properties, we didn't need to add boiling water when preparing the microwave distillation step. Then I placed a cone of ice on the lid of the extraction vessel,. And inside this large vase in the middle of the vessel we had already placed a beaker . We did this so that when the water was heated in the microwave, it would melt directly into the beaker, allowing all the volatile water-soluble elements to flow back into the beaker and collect the ginger hydrosol. The process was repeated 3 times and 9 minutes each, letting it warm up for about 2 minutes after we take it out of the microwave and produced 300ml of ginger hydrosol.

To analyze which compound exactly is in the ginger hydrosol we needed to run into the GC-MS . But first we needed to do the solid phase extraction (SPE) to remove any water that might be in the our hydrosol .After that we used 1 ml of our sample obtained from the SPE phase. The GC-MS is extremely useful for finding all the compounds through peaks. I was able to get about 10 to 12 peaks for all different hydrosol concentrations.And each peak represent differents compound that we can find in the ginger

From the results obtained, I was able to deduce that the main compounds found were borneol, the two citral configurations (B-citral with 34.5 mg and Alpha-citral with 47.1 mg)and Zingiberene.But thanks to the results obtained from the GC-MS database, I found that the rt (retention time) and calculated the RI. Then i compared it with the DB5-mass RI of the NIST.

Table 1 : Compound found in the ginger hydrosol

We used 4-Ethylguaicol as internal standard to create a calibration curve curve , which will be used to obtain the equation of linear curve which helped us calculate to the different concentrations of our different compounds

Graph 1 : Calibration curve with the internal standard (4-Ethylguaicol ) — Calibration curve with the internal standard (4-Ethylguaicol )

My name is Kadidja and I am a 3rd year student in biopharmaceutical science with a medical chemistry option. I will be a volunteer at the John L. Holmes Spectrometry Facility in summer 2023. I very quickly developed a certain fascination for science, especially around biology and chemestry. Finally, thanks to this placement as a volunteer in the laboratory and working on the hydrosol project, I have learned how to analyse, quantify coumpound using the GC-MS. I was also able to develop chemical analysis techniques to study the composition of the hydrosol