Food & Beverages

Preparative separation of ecdysteroids

Starting Material: Ecdysteroid-rich Cyanotis arachnoidea extracts

Goal: Isolation and purification

Ecdysteroids, abundant in plants, exhibit diverse pharmacological effects, including anabolic and neuroprotective properties. With growing demand for ecdysteroids in dietary supplements, there’s a clear need for industrial-scale isolation.

This study aimed to develop scalable centrifugal partition chromatography (CPC) methods for large-scale fractionation. The focus was on isolating 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E), the most abundant phytoecdysteroid, from Cyanotis arachnoidea extract used in supplements. Optimization of the CPC purification method yielded promising results: high stationary phase retention, solubility (>100 mg/mL), optimal distribution of target components (KD=0.5-2.0), and high selectivity (α >1.5). The optimized method proved simple, cost-effective, and scalable, achieving an impressive 80% isolated yield of 20E. Remaining minor and sub-minor ecdysteroids can be further fractionated using two-stage multiple dual-mode (MDM) methods, utilizing RotaChrom’s Continuous CPC. This research highlights CPC’s potential in industrial-scale ecdysteroid isolation, paving the way for advancements in pharmacology and dietary supplement production.

Purification of quercetin glycosides

Goal: Separation

The separation task was to investigate the feasibility of the isolation of quercetin glycosides. The primary objective was to achieve a purity value greater than 75% by weight for quercetin-3-β-O-D-glucoside (QG) quercetin-3-O-β-D-glucuronide (MQ) and a quercetin hexoside (QH) using food-grade solvents.

After extraction the developed CPC method was capable of isolating the three target compounds together with purity greater than the expected. It had a high throughput using only food grade chemicals. The end product could be re-crystallized from water which could further increase purity.