Plant cells are superior chemists and humans will never catch up with these skills: the fanciest compounds must be purified from plant sources now and in the future?
It is quite difficult to study the true bioactivities of natural metabolites without both full purification and identification of the studied compounds. We can achieve both of these goals and the purification can be extended to even gram quantities, if needed. In these cases all the compounds are isolated from plant, insect or microbial sources. We also produce some compounds by semi-synthesis, and these compounds may be fully natural or nature-inspired modifications of natural building blocks.
Our expertise in the purification focuses on the complex plant metabolites such as oligomeric ellagitannins. At the moment these can be purified from monomers up to heptamers range. Only a very limited number of monomers and dimers can be produced via organic synthesis and thus it is crucial to be able to produce these highly active compounds by other means.
Typically all the purification steps include large-scale extraction, extract purification by first utilizing differences in the compound solubilities, followed by gel chromatography and preparative or semi-preparative LC. Also centrifugal counter current chromatography can be utilized in extreme cases.
