| abstract |
A method for obtaining a smoking material additive which is a smoke-aroma precursor comprises the steps of removing surface gum, preferably surface gum only, from Nicotinia plant leaves or flowers and subjecting the gum to a partition or purification process whereby a diterpene fraction constituting the said precursor and a fraction containing undesirable lipids are obtained, the latter fraction being discarded. The gum may be removed by solvent washing, suitably with chloroform. The partition or purification step may be a two-phase solvent partition process, for example using a hexane/aqueous methanol system. |