Knowledge of the chemical and physical structure of young soot and its precursors is very useful in understanding the paths leading to soot particle inception. This paper presents chemical and morphological characterization of the products generated in ethylene and benzene inverse diffusion flames (IDF) using different analytical techniques. The trend in the data indicates that the soot precursor material and soot particles generated in the benzene IDF have a higher degree of complexity than the samples obtained in the ethylene IDF, which is reflected by an increase in the aromaticity of the chloroform extracts observed by H-1 NMR and FT-IR, and shape and size of soot particles obtained by TEM and HR-TEM. It is important to highlight that the soot precursor material obtained at the lower positions in the ethylene IDF has a significant contribution of aliphatic groups, which play an important role in the particle inception and mass growth processes during the early stages of soot formation. However, these groups progressively disappear in the samples taken at higher positions in the flame, due to thermal decomposition processes. (C) 2009 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.