Rafaella Georgiou, Rachel S Popelka-Filcoff, Dimosthenis Sokaras, Victoria Beltran, Ilaria Bonaduce, Jordan Spangler, Serge X Cohen, Roy Lehmann, Sylvain Bernard, Jean-Pascal Rueff, Uwe Bergmann, Loïc Bertrand
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2022 May 26For thousands of years, the unique physicochemical properties of plant exudates have defined uses in material culture and practical applications. Native Australian plant exudates, including resins, kinos, and gums, have been used and continue to be used by Aboriginal Australians for numerous technical and cultural purposes. A historic collection of well-preserved native Australian plant exudates, assembled a century ago by plant naturalists, gives a rare window into the history and chemical composition of these materials. Here we report the full hierarchical characterization of four genera from this collection, Xanthorrhoea, Callitris, Eucalyptus, and Acacia, from the local elemental speciation, to functional groups and main molecular markers. We use high-resolution X-ray Raman spectroscopy (XRS) to achieve bulk-sensitive chemical speciation of these plant exudates, including insoluble, amorphous, and cross-linked fractions, without the limitation of invasive and/or surface specific methods. Combinatorial testing of the XRS data allows direct classification of these complex natural species as terpenoid, aromatic, phenolic, and polysaccharide materials. Differences in intragenera chemistry was evidenced by detailed interpretation of the XRS spectral features. We complement XRS with Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and pyrolysis–GC-MS (Py-GC-MS). This multimodal approach provides a fundamental understanding of the chemistry of these natural materials long used by Aboriginal Australian peoples.
Rafaella Georgiou, Rachel S Popelka-Filcoff, Dimosthenis Sokaras, Victoria Beltran, Ilaria Bonaduce, Jordan Spangler, Serge X Cohen, Roy Lehmann, Sylvain Bernard, Jean-Pascal Rueff, Uwe Bergmann, Loïc Bertrand. Disentangling the chemistry of Australian plant exudates from a unique historical collection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2022 May 26;119(22):e2116021119
PMID: 35617429
View Full Text