Raman optical activity: A powerful technique to investigate essential oil components

Abstract

The theory and some applications of Raman Optical Activity (ROA) towards terpene analysis are presented. With this technique, vibrational optical activity from chiral molecules can be measured providing their absolute configuration. This short review provides data obtained for pinene, verbenone, menthol, camphor, carenes and related molecules. The ROA technique seems to be a powerful tool which permits correlation between the properties of biocompounds and their structure.