By Pascal Champagnat, Gilles Figueredo, Jean-Claude Chalchat and Jean-Marie Bessière

Abstract: Abstract: An oil was obtained from roots of Vetiveria nigritana (Benth.) Stapf collected in Mali and analyzed by GC and GC/MS. Fifty-four constituents (79.7% of the whole oil) were identified. Prezizanoic acid (15.0%), preziza-7(15)- en-12-ol (9.5%), cedren-8-en-15-ol (6.2%), preziza-7(15)-en-3α-ol (6.0%) and zizanoic acid (5.9%) were the major components of Vetiveria nigritana oil. Key Word Index: Vetiveria nigritana, Poaceae, essential oil composition, prezizanoic acid.

Plant Name
Vetiveria nigritana (Benth.) Stapf (Poaceae).

Source
Roots of V. nigritana were collected from Koulikouro, near Bamako (Mali, Africa) in March 2002. Plant material was identified by G. Aymonin (Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France). A voucher specimen of the whole plant has been deposited in the Herbarium of the University of Clermont-Ferrand (France); register number CLF 049699.

Plant Part
The oil was obtained from air dried roots by steam distillation in a Kaiser & Lang-type apparatus for 12 h to produce yellow oil in 2% w/w yield.

Previous Work
The first botanical descriptions of this plant were published in Niger Flora (1) and in Flora of Tropical Africa (2). In some countries of Africa, in particular Senegal, Gabon, Mali and Niger, roots of Vetiveria nigritana were used in the following fields: perfume, cosmetics and medicine. Macerations or infusions of roots were added to drinking water or used as an antidiarrheal for children (3).

In spite of traditional use, there was no work about any components of these roots. Only a few articles were previously published about Angolan root oil by Cardoso et al. (4-6) and Nigam et al. (7). Hutchinson et al. made reference to the variations of percentage of essential oil certainly relating to the soils (8). In the book on genus Vetiveria published in 2002, Maffei (9) reported all studies concerning V. zizanioides, but only mentioned V. nigritana without any comment.