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Organic Certification is Not Enough: The Case of the Methoxydecane Frankincense
Frankincense, the oleo-gum-resin of Boswellia trees, has been an important religious and medicinal element for thousands of years, and today is used extensively for essential oils. One of the most popular frankincense species is Boswellia sacra Flueck. (syn. Boswellia carteri Birdw.) from Somalia an...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6524464/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30987305 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/plants8040088 |
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author | Johnson, Stephen DeCarlo, Anjanette Satyal, Prabodh Dosoky, Noura S. Sorensen, Aaron Setzer, William N. |
author_facet | Johnson, Stephen DeCarlo, Anjanette Satyal, Prabodh Dosoky, Noura S. Sorensen, Aaron Setzer, William N. |
author_sort | Johnson, Stephen |
collection | PubMed |
description | Frankincense, the oleo-gum-resin of Boswellia trees, has been an important religious and medicinal element for thousands of years, and today is used extensively for essential oils. One of the most popular frankincense species is Boswellia sacra Flueck. (syn. Boswellia carteri Birdw.) from Somalia and Somaliland. Recent increases in demand have led to many areas being overharvested, emphasizing the need for incentives and monitoring for sustainable harvesting, such as certification schemes. Concurrently, a new chemical component, called methoxydecane, has emerged in oils claimed to be B. carteri, suggesting the possibility of a chemical marker of overharvesting or other stress that could aid in monitoring. To find the source of this new chemical component, we sampled resin directly from trees in areas producing the new methoxydecane chemotype. This revealed that methoxydecane comes not from Boswellia carteri, but from a newly described frankincense species, Boswellia occulta. The presence of Boswellia occulta oil in essential oil sold as pure B. carteri, including certified organic oil, emphasizes the current lack of traceability in the supply chain and the ineffectiveness of organic certification to secure purity and sustainable harvesting in wildcrafted species. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6524464 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-65244642019-06-05 Organic Certification is Not Enough: The Case of the Methoxydecane Frankincense Johnson, Stephen DeCarlo, Anjanette Satyal, Prabodh Dosoky, Noura S. Sorensen, Aaron Setzer, William N. Plants (Basel) Article Frankincense, the oleo-gum-resin of Boswellia trees, has been an important religious and medicinal element for thousands of years, and today is used extensively for essential oils. One of the most popular frankincense species is Boswellia sacra Flueck. (syn. Boswellia carteri Birdw.) from Somalia and Somaliland. Recent increases in demand have led to many areas being overharvested, emphasizing the need for incentives and monitoring for sustainable harvesting, such as certification schemes. Concurrently, a new chemical component, called methoxydecane, has emerged in oils claimed to be B. carteri, suggesting the possibility of a chemical marker of overharvesting or other stress that could aid in monitoring. To find the source of this new chemical component, we sampled resin directly from trees in areas producing the new methoxydecane chemotype. This revealed that methoxydecane comes not from Boswellia carteri, but from a newly described frankincense species, Boswellia occulta. The presence of Boswellia occulta oil in essential oil sold as pure B. carteri, including certified organic oil, emphasizes the current lack of traceability in the supply chain and the ineffectiveness of organic certification to secure purity and sustainable harvesting in wildcrafted species. MDPI 2019-04-04 /pmc/articles/PMC6524464/ /pubmed/30987305 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/plants8040088 Text en © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Johnson, Stephen DeCarlo, Anjanette Satyal, Prabodh Dosoky, Noura S. Sorensen, Aaron Setzer, William N. Organic Certification is Not Enough: The Case of the Methoxydecane Frankincense |
title | Organic Certification is Not Enough: The Case of the Methoxydecane Frankincense |
title_full | Organic Certification is Not Enough: The Case of the Methoxydecane Frankincense |
title_fullStr | Organic Certification is Not Enough: The Case of the Methoxydecane Frankincense |
title_full_unstemmed | Organic Certification is Not Enough: The Case of the Methoxydecane Frankincense |
title_short | Organic Certification is Not Enough: The Case of the Methoxydecane Frankincense |
title_sort | organic certification is not enough: the case of the methoxydecane frankincense |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6524464/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30987305 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/plants8040088 |
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