Isolation and Purification of Secondary Metabolites

The isolation of water-soluble natural products – challenges, strategies and perspectives

“…As previous analyses 14,15 and our surveys have shown, silica-gel normal-phase adsorption chromatography is, by far, the most common procedure for the isolation of natural products. 56 While the strong polarity of water-soluble compounds would, in principle, preclude the use of normal-phase chromatography for the isolation of water-soluble metabolites, 56 this is not a rule.…”

“…A two-year survey on articles published in the Journal of Natural Products 30 years ago (January 1990 to December 1991) revealed that over 90% of natural product isolation projects used normal-phase chromatography on silica-gel as a step of the isolation procedure. 14 In 2012, a meta-analysis of 2000 articles dealing with natural product isolation and identification 15 indicated that (a) the average number of steps for the isolation of secondary metabolites was less than three in more than 76% of the surveyed articles; (b) two-thirds of the articles reported the use of normal-phase silica gel gravity column chromatography for the isolation of natural products; (c) chromatography on C 18 reversed-phase silica gel and Sephadex LH-20 were used to some extent; (d) other methods, such as counter-current chromatography, were much less utilized.…”

“…Prod. ) reporting the isolation of natural products, a period we considered representative between McAlpine's and Hochlowski's 1990–1991 survey 14 and Pauli and collaborators' analysis. 15 Our second survey covered a more recent three-year period (2017–2019) of 862 articles also published in J. Nat.…”