Encapsulation of essential oils for enhancement antifungal activity

Medicinal plants are known as important sources of the bioactive compounds. The prepared essential oils from medicinal plants are aromatic, volatile oily liquids consist of various terpenes, phenols and other minor compounds. They have broad antimicrobial and insecticidal activities. The main problem in using essential oils is their volatility, instability and vulnerable nature. During application, essential oils can be normally decomposed by oxidation, volatilization, heating, light, etc. Degradation of the bioactive compounds decreases efficacy of essential oils. Encapsulation is introduced as a suitable and novel approach to overcome the above limitations. In this technique, the small particles of core material were enclosed by a shell material to protect them from unfavorable environmental conditions. Hence, this method will decrease the evaporation rate and facilitate handling. The produced particles will have uniform distribution with controlled release of the bioactive compounds. Efficiency of the encapsulation can be related to the kind of selected encapsulation technique, so should be considered. There are a lot of researches that demonstrated antifungal properties of the essential oils were enhanced via encapsulation