Green chromatographic fingerprinting: An environmentally friendly approach for the development of separation methods for fingerprinting complex matrices

Abstract

A chromatographic fingerprint is a comprehensive method that reveals the distinctive pattern of peaks across the chromatogram for a given sample. It is considered an effective strategy to assess the identity and quality of herbal materials, as well as for the control of the quality of their derived products. HPLC is the most employed technique for these purposes and it is used routinely for quality control in industry. Hence, its impact on the environment should not be neglected. This work provides a rational and generic procedure to qualitatively fingerprint complex matrices. Resource- and time-saving experimental designs were selected; an alternative safer organic solvent was tested and a time-saving and innovative response entitled the green chromatographic fingerprinting response was developed and employed. This procedure was applied in the development of chromatographic fingerprints for extracts of Bauhinia forficata and Casearia sylvestris. Moreover, the response proposed here can be combined with a complementary metric available in the literature to compare methods using different solvents. According to this, the chromatographic fingerprints developed here using ethanol as the organic solvent provided a performance better than that of reference methods in which more harmful acetonitrile or methanol were employed.

Acetone as a greener alternative to acetonitrile in liquid chromatographic fingerprinting

“…80 mg of the extract solubilized in 500 μL of the 15:85 H 2 O/EtOH v/v. The elution was developed with 3.0 mL of the 15:85 H 2 O/EtOH v/v to eliminate very low polarity compounds . The eluate was fully dried under N 2 .…”

“…Many definitions have been proposed for GAC, but the most comprehensive one has been attributed to Lawrence, who defined it as “the use of analytical chemistry techniques and methodologies that reduce or eliminate solvents, reagents, preservatives, and other chemicals that are hazardous to human health or the environment and that may also enable faster and more energy‐efficient analyses without compromising performance criteria” . From this heuristic perspective the development of a new method should be done taking into consideration aspects related with sustainability together with aspects related to the efficiency of the analytical method in solving a specific problem . After that, the concepts and principles of green chemistry gradually have been particularized to GAC .…”

Development of a comprehensive method for analyzing clerodane‐type diterpenes and phenolic compounds from Casearia sylvestris Swartz (Salicaceae) based on ultra high performance liquid chromatography combined with chemometric tools

“…Therefore, considering the importance of including phenolic compounds in such analyses, this work aims the development of a comprehensive analytical method utilising UHPLC with diode array detection (DAD) for analyzing the two C. sylvestris varieties. The challenge during the development of a separation method of herbal extracts is mostly related to their complexity, which requires a rational approach to achieve the optimal response (18). With this regard, the use of design of experiments (DOE) allowed the simultaneous extraction as well as detection of the greatest number of compounds from both phenolics and clerodane-type diterpenes classes.…”

Partial least squares model and design of experiments toward the analysis of the metabolome of Jatropha gossypifolia leaves: Extraction and chromatographic fingerprint optimization

“…J. gossypifolia, a phytomedine candidate in Brazilian health system (RENISUS), was used as a model due to the chemically diverse nature of its metabolites including hypotensive effects, inhibition of acetylcholinesterase, cytotoxic, antifungal, antibacterial properties, and potential source of biofuel [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. This is a reliable strategy for nontarget metabolomics using a relatively limited number of experiments.…”