**5. Conclusions**

It was found in this study that the essential oil of aerial parts of wild *S. serrata* from different populations of the highlands of Guatemala showed high concentrations of chamazulene. In addition, the essential oil of roots of the plant was analyzed for the first time, which presented a composition very different from that of the aerial parts, as it did not present chamazulene and presented α-longipinene as the major component. It was also verified that the seeds of *S. serrata* present a high viability and that the seedlings obtained from seeds also have a high percentage of survival. Therefore, *S. serrata* can be considered as a plant with high potential for domestication and cultivation for the production of essential oil with high content of chamazulene.

**Figure 7.**

*Chromatogram of the essential oil of roots of S. serrata.*

**Figure 9.** *Structures of α-longipinene and santolina triene, major components of the essential oil of roots of S. serrata.*

**213**

**Author details**

Guatemala

Guatemala

Juan Francisco Pérez-Sabino1

Manuel Alejandro Muñoz-Wug1

Guatemala City, Guatemala

Isabel Cristina Gaitán-Fernández3

and Antonio Jorge Ribeiro da Silva5

*Seed Propagation and Constituents of the Essential Oil of* Stevia serrata *Cav. from Guatemala*

The present research was partially funded by the General Directorate of Research of the University of San Carlos of Guatemala, project 4.8.63.1.06, within the framework of the University Program of Interdisciplinary Research in Health. The authors would like to agree to CAPES, CNPq, and FAPERJ from Brazil.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest with respect to this

\*, Max Samuel Mérida-Reyes1

1 School of Chemistry, University of San Carlos of Guatemala, Guatemala City,

2 Faculty of Agronomy, University of San Carlos of Guatemala, Guatemala City,

3 School of Biological Chemistry, University of San Carlos of Guatemala,

\*Address all correspondence to: fpsabino@usac.edu.gt

provided the original work is properly cited.

4 Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

5 Research Institute of Natural Products, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

, Bessie Evelyn Oliva-Hernández1

, Daniel Luiz Reis Simas4

, José Vicente Martínez-Arévalo2

,

,

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88221*

**Acknowledgements**

**Conflict of interest**

publication.

*Seed Propagation and Constituents of the Essential Oil of* Stevia serrata *Cav. from Guatemala DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88221*
