Separation

Techniques
Vacuum Liquid Chromatography
• Popular method for fractionation of crude extracts due to its
ease of use and high sample capacity
• Vacuum is applied in to increase flow rate and hence speed up
the fractionation procedure.
• Eluted fractions are usually analysed by TLC for their
composition.
• Used for different compound classes such as sterols,
flavonoids, alkaloids, triterpene saponins or coumarins
• Recently, VLC was part of the isolation procedure of α-
viniferin and hopeaphenol, trimeric and tetrameric stilbenes
from Shorea ovalis
Flash Chromatography
• Mainly used for rapid fractionation of crude extracts or
coarsely purified fractions.
• By applying nitrogen or compressed air, the mobile phase is
flushed through the stationary phase in a tightly closed glass
column or prepacked cartridges.
• Some recent examples of FC as part of the isolation strategy
include
• Acylphloroglucinols from Hypericum empetrifolium
• Antiplasmodial aporphine alkaloids and sesquiterpene lactones from
Liriodendron tulipifera
• Microbial stress-induced resveratrol oligomers from Vitis vinfera leaves
MPLC

• Introduced in the 1970s as an efficient technique for

preparative separation of organic compounds.
• Overcame one major drawback of low pressure liquid
chromatography (LPLC), i.e. the limited sample loading.
• The distinction between low pressure, medium pressure and
high pressure LC is based on the pressure ranges applied in
these techniques and the overlap is often considerable
• Commonly used to enrich biologically active secondary
metabolites before further purification by HPLC due to its
lower cost, higher sample loading and higher throughput.
• Cheng et al. used normal-phase (NP)-MPLC as a pre-treatment
method to enrich ginsenoside-Ro from the crude extract of
Panax ginseng and purified it by high-performance counter-
current chromatography. Interestingly, this two-step
purification process resulted in a 79.2% total recovery of
ginsenoside-Ro.
• Some studies have revealed the potential and suitability of
MPLC for direct isolation of pure natural compounds which
failed to be achieved by other chromatographic methods.
Centrifugally accelerated TLC
• Principle

The sample to be separated is applied, as a solution, near the center of a

spinning disk coated with a thin layer of sorbent. Elution by solvent forms
circular bands of the separated components which are spun off from the
edge of the rotor together with solvent. A novel collection system brings
the eluate to a single output tube
• A dipeptide namely aurantiamide benzoate and two xanthones,
cycloartobiloxanthone and dihydroartoindonesianin C were
isolated from the stem bark of Artocarpus kemando by
chromatotron using hexane: acetone (13:2, v/v) as eluents
• Isolation of flavonoid fraction from the leaves of Ricinus
communis was carried out by CTLC using silica gel as
stationary phase and n-hexane: methylacetate: methanol
mixtures as mobile phase .
HPLC
• HPLC is a chromatographic technique that can separate a
mixture of compounds and is used in phytochemical and
analytical chemistry to identify, quantify and purify the
individual components of the mixture
• It is versatile and robust
• Several authors describe the use of HPLC for characterization
and quantification of secondary metabolites in plant extracts,
mainly phenol compounds, steroids, flavonoids, alkaloids
References
• Natural product isolation – how to get from biological material
to pure compounds by Franz Bucar*a, Abraham Wubea and
Martin Schmidb
• Practice of Thin Layer Chromatography By Joseph C.
Touchstone
• Medium Pressure Liquid Chromatography by K. Hostettmann
and C. Terreaux