Suppose you steam distilled thyme and found that the resulti

Suppose you steam distilled thyme, and found that the resulting oil possessed promising antibiotic activity. To determine which chemical is the active component, you need to separate the mixture. If the major components are the chemicals shown below, what technique could you use to purify 1 g of the oil and obtain a pure sample of each compound? Explain why your chosen technique would be successful HO OII OHI thymol p-cymene linalool borneol

Solution

To separate the four components shown above we use fractional distillation,the boiling points for the four compounds are different from each other and they are very close to each other.

Therefore fractional distillation would be the best method to separate each compound into its pure form. the isolated compounds can then be analyzed for its activity as needed.