6728-26-3

(E)-2-Hexenal is the simplest straight-chain unsaturated aldehyde of interest for perfumes and flavors. It occurs in essential oils obtained from green leaves of many plants.
(E)-2-Hexenal is a colorless, sharp, herbal-green-smelling liquid with a slight acrolein-like pungency. Upon dilution, however, it smells pleasantly green and apple-like. The aldehyde can be synthesized by reacting butanal with vinyl ethyl ether in the presence of boron trifluoride, followed by hydrolysis of the reaction product with dilute sulfuric acid.
Biosynthetic methods for its production as natural flavor material have been developed.
(E)-2-Hexenal has an intense odor and is used in perfumes to obtain a green-leaf note and in fruit flavors for green nuances.

clear colorless to light yellow liquid

Also known as “leaf aldehyde,” it is of special interest because it is naturally present in numerous fruits and is also used as a food additive for flavoring. Feron et al. identified hexenal in about 80 different types of food.

trans-2-Hexenal is used in evaluation of quality of protected designation of origin virgin olive oils by headspace solid-phase microextraction-gas chromatography using flame ionization detection and multivariate analysis. It was used in the multicomponent method for the determination of low-molecular-weight carbonyl compounds in biological samples.

ChEBI: A 2-hexenal in which the olefinic double bond has E configuration. It occurs naturally in a wide range of fruits, vegetables, and spices.

Journal of the American Chemical Society, 71, p. 3468, 1949 DOI: 10.1021/ja01178a061
Tetrahedron Letters, 36, p. 8513, 1995 DOI: 10.1016/0040-4039(95)01784-F

4°C, stored under nitrogen