Schinus terebinthifolius countercurrent chromatography (Part II): Intra-apparatus scale-up and inter-apparatus method transfer.

Abstract

Countercurrent chromatography (CCC) is being widely used across the world for purification of various materials, especially in natural product research. The predictability of CCC scale-up has been successfully demonstrated using specially designed instruments of the same manufacturer. The reality is that the most of CCC users do not have access to such instruments and do not have enough experience to transfer methods from one CCC column to another. This unique study of three international teams is based on innovative approach to simplify the scale-up between different CCC machines using fractionation of Schinus terebinthifolius berries dichloromethane extract as a case study. The optimized separation methodology, recently developed by the authors (Part I), was repeatedly performed on CCC columns of different design available at most research laboratories across the world. Hexane - ethyl acetate - methanol - water (6:1:6:1, v/v/v/v) was used as solvent system with masticadienonic and 3β-masticadienolic acids as target compounds to monitor stationary phase retention and calculate peak resolution. It has been demonstrated that volumetric, linear and length scale-up transfer factors based on column characteristics can be directly applied to different i.d., volume and length columns independently on instrument make in an intra-apparatus scale-up and inter-apparatus method transfer.