Chemical Composition and Phytotoxic Activity of Artemisia selengensis Turcz. Volatiles

Abstract

The chemical profile and allelopathic action of the volatiles produced by Artemisia selengensis were studied. Artemisia selengensis was found to release volatile chemicals to the environment to influence other plants' growth, which suppressed the root length of Amaranthus retroflexus and Poa annua by 50.46 % and 87.83 % under 80 g/1.5 L treatment, respectively. GC/MS analysis led to the identification of 41 compounds (by hydrodistillation, HD) and 48 compounds (by headspace solid-phase microextraction, HS-SPME), with eucalyptol (15.45 % by HD and 28.09 % by HS-SPME) being detected as the most abundant constituent. The essential oil (EO) of A. selengensis completely inhibited the seed germination of A. retroflexus and P. annua at 1 mg/mL and 0.5 mg/mL, respectively. However, eucalyptol displayed much weaker activity compared with the EO, indicating that other less abundant constituents might contribute significantly to the EO's activity. Our study is the first report on the phytotoxicity of A. selengensis EO, suggesting that A. selengensis might release allelopathic volatile agents into the environment that negatively affect other plants' development so as to facilitate its own dominance; the potential value of utilizing A. selengensis EO as an environmentally friendly herbicide is also discussed.

Comparative study of the micromorphological and anatomical characteristics of two Artemisia species

“…Another important role of secondary metabolites of Artemisia species is their allelopathic activity. The allelopathic activity of A. vulgaris (Barney et al, 2005;Pannacci et al, 2020), A. absinthium (Kapoor et al, 2019;Jiang et al, 2021), A. frigida (Wang et al, 2022), A. scoparia (Kaur et al, 2010), A. selengensis (Shi et al, 2021) and many other species has been confirmed. The allelopathic potential of the secondary metabolites synthesized by Artemisia species has led to increased interest in research on their morphological, anatomical, and phytochemical properties.…”