Acidolysis-dominated pretreatment elevates distillation yield and impacts composition, antioxidant and antifungal activities of essential oil from seeds.

Proper pretreatment of herbal material containing essential oils (EOs) could enhance its volatile components release through either removing physical barriers or conquering chemical bonds and thereby improve hydrodistillation yield. In this regard, a trial pretreatment including pulverization, enzymolysis, short time microwave irradiation and acidolysis of seeds was integrated into the essential oil (EO) preparation to elevate the EO yield. On the basis of Plackett-Burman design analysis, three parameters (acidolysis duration, HCl concentration of acidolysis and sieving mesh) were significant for the EO preparation.