Isolation of Natural Products by Ion-Exchange Chromatography

Abstract

Ionizable compounds can be separated based on changes in charge characteristics using Ion-exchange chromatography (IEC). Liquid chromatography (LC) is a method that is very adaptable and frequently utilized due to its enormous sample-handling capacity, broad application (especially to proteins and enzymes), reasonable cost, powerful resolving ability, and simplicity of scale-up and automation. Extraction, isolation, and characterization of certain analytes from complicated plant, animal, microbial, and food matrices is the main objective of many natural products chemists. They heavily rely on extremely complex and highly hyphenated current instruments to accomplish this purpose. Nonetheless, the great bulk of contemporary equipment commonly seen in natural product chemists' labs is based on the elementary ideas of intermolecular interactions to accomplish separation. Fundamentally, the most basic and potent of these interactions is ion-exchange chromatography, which is regarded as a reasonably priced and efficient method for "cleaning up" a sample. High recoveries of important analytes are another benefit of IEC, as is the option to alter the stationary and mobile phases to "catch and release" molecules of interest with specificity.