Isolation of artelasticine for student practice in low-resource laboratory settings

Abstract

The isolation of secondary metabolites can be used by students for laboratory activities in the natural product chemistry course. The laboratory experience of isolating secondary metabolites will be useful for students to isolate secondary metabolites in other plant species whose chemical content has never been reported. In this laboratory the student isolated artelasticine from Artocarpus scortechinii. Students learn about extraction, fractionation, purification, and structural elucidation through the natural product chemistry laboratory activities. Various chromatography techniques are used to obtain pure artelasticine compounds. The artelasticine structure was determined based on UV, IR, 1H-NMR and 13C-NMR spectroscopic data. The laboratory method allowed students to readily understand the process of isolating artelasticine.