Centrifugal Partition Chromatography (CPC): An advance tool for purification of phytoconstituents

Abstract

Centrifugal Partition Chromatography (CPC) is one of the various techniques constituent of Counter Current Chromatography (CCC). It is a preparative chromatography technique which functions on the principles of liquid/liquid partitioning chromatography in that two immiscible liquid phases are mixed together by centrifugal force and pressure to form a two-phase system, and then separated multiple times. It is at that time the exchange of molecules between the two phases occurs. The separation of the solutes is achieved as a function of the specific partitioning coefficient of each solute between the mobile and stationary phases. The individual solutes are isolated based on the different partitioning coefficients of each compound in this two-phase system. These fractions (eluates) will contain the individual purified solutes. CPC offers several advantages, including low solvent consumption, no irreversible adsorption or sample loss (100% recovery), no denaturation of fragile molecules, high purification levels up to 99.9% and adapted to all types of products, natural or synthetic. It can be used for final purification (purity > 99.5%) of molecules derived from natural extracts, synthetic mixtures or biological matrices, fractionization or pre-fractionization of highly complex crude extracts, liquid-liquid extraction using the newly developed Centrifugal Partition Extractors (CPE) prototypes. The applications of CPC are in wide range and include fractionation, isolation of phytoconstituents from various extract/mixtures and crude synthetic mixture.