Extraction of essential oils from locally available plant Artemisia Herba-alba was carried out using steam-distillation method. Extracted oils were screened for their chemical composition, antibacterial and antioxidant activities in order to find new metabolite products, which are characterized by a biological activity. Thirty-three constituents, representing 97.54% of the essential oil of Artemisia herba-alba was determined by GC-MS analysis. The main compounds identified are: davanone

more »

... camphor (15.96%) and thujone (9.63%). The antimicrobial activity of the oil was tested using the agar disc diffusion method, by determining the inhibition zone and the minimum inhibitory concentration. The results have shown a great potential of the antimicrobial activity against the tested strains with an enhanced sensitivity towards the gram-negative strains of Salmonella enteric, Klebsiella and the gram-positive strains of Listeria monocytogenes and Staphylococcus sp. in comparison with the other tested bacteria. The test's results of the essential oil's antioxidant activity, obtained with the anti-radical method 2,2-diphenyl-1-1-picrylhydrazil (DPPH) and the iron-reducing power (FRAP), were compared with those of the ascorbic acid; the usual synthetic antioxidant. The comparison have demonstrated, firstly with the DPPH method a considerable level of antioxidant activity of the essential oil (IC 50 = 17.73±0.29 µg mLG 1 ) but still lower than that found for the synthetic antioxidant that is the ascorbic acid while the opposite occurred with the iron reduction method, with an higher obtained value of EC 50 =12.53±0.25 µg mLG 1 , for the essential oil's antioxidant activity.