Purification of α-Linolenic Acid from Flaxseed Oil by Silver-Silica Gel Chromatography Column

Abstract

Flaxseed oil contains significant amounts of essential fatty acid, α-linolenic acid (ALA) with a content of 61% of the total fatty acid. ALA is attracting increasing attention because of their importance to human health. ALA has various physiological activities whose absence in the diet is responsible for the development of a wide variety of abnormalities. Highly purified ALA is required on pharmaceutical applications. This work reports as recovery of highly purified ALA from flaxseed oil by means of a process, which involves simultaneous oil saponification–extraction, followed by the ethyl esterification of fatty acids. Thereafter, the polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) were concentrated by molecular distillation method, and ethyl esters below ALA were fractionated from ethyl–PUFA concentrate by mean of open column chromatography with silver–silica gel as stationary phase. The recovery in the combined process was 79%, and the final purity was 94.7%. Therefore, highly pure PUFA ALA could be procured by argentated silica gel chromatography column.