New analytical tools for quality control of natural products

Innrain 80/82, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria

Phytopharmacy with its huge variety and complexity of plants, extraction procedures and ingredients is a permanently demanding challenge for the analytical chemist. The separation of active components from natural products has become increasingly important and new advancements in chromatography allow exploring inaccessible areas of natural product isolation. There is a need for highly efficient techniques to handle the problems associated with sample preparation, separation and identification. Novel enrichment and purification methods based on modern SPE technologies are applied to reduce the complexity of plant materials while µ-HPLC is used for separation, preconcentration and fractionation. Recent research in the area of solid-phase extraction led to the development of novel stationary phases based on organic polymers and fullerene-silica for enrichment and purification of natural products. Considerable progress has been made in the development of stationary phases which can be tailored to a specific application allowing endless possibilities in terms of selectivity tuning. An analytical platform which allows to profile and characterize plant materials and their extractives by vibrational spectroscopy, infrared (IR) based imaging, CE-MS and matrix-free material enhanced laser desorption ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (mf-MELDI-TOF/MS) was established. Thereby, vibrational spectroscopy offers the advantages of fast, non-invasive and simultaneous determination of chemical and physical properties being suitable for high-throughput analytical quality control.