High hydrostatic pressure-assisted micellar media as an efficient and green strategy to extract artemisinin from Artemisia annua L.

Abstract

With increasingly serious environmental pollution, the development of sustainable green technologies has attracted global attention. In the present study, we propose an efficient and eco-friendly strategy to obtain active ingredients from plant tissues. High hydrostatic pressure-assisted eco-friendly micellar media (alkyl polyglucoside, APG1214) was used to extract artemisinin (ART) from Artemisia annua L. leaves. ART accumulated in glandular secretory trichomes (GTs) on the surface of A. annua leaves. When the pressure increased, the GTs were crushed, broken, or deformed, resulting in full contact between ART and APG1214. At this time, the hydrogen bonding force between ART and APG1214 led to the formation of ART-APG1214 supramolecules, which were folded and self-assembled into micelles. The extraction process reached equilibrium under continuous pressure and was then carried out by pressure from the GTs during unloading. It is worth noting that the entire process occurred by fast washing and slow diffusion simultaneously, with fast washing as the main step. This method not only showed high efficiency and low energy consumption but also the potential recycling of APG1214, thereby providing an efficient, eco-friendly, safe, and cost-saving strategy for the industrial production of natural products.