Countercurrent Chromatography Workshop at ASP 2018
How Can Countercurrent Separation help You with Your Natural Product Research?
Did you ever wonder what is countercurrent chromatography? How does it
work concretely, and why choosing this technique over other purification
methodologies? You will have the opportunity to learn more about the techniques and talk with different specialists in the field at ASP2018!
Our proposed workshop is dedicated to understanding the practical aspects
of countercurrent/partition chromatography while offering different
examples of applications ranging from the large scale purification of
target compounds, to the reproducible fractionation of complex mixtures
for their biological investigations. Our invited speaker this year is Dr. Guy Harris who has utilized and implemented countercurrent separation processes at Merck in the natural product chemistry department.
This webpage contains all information and materials pertaining to the countercurrent/partition chromatography workshop organized at the annual meeting of the American Society of Pharmacognosy ASP 2018 in Lexington, Kentucky. This workshop proposed by the CENAPT team and moderated by Drs. Guido Pauli, and Charlotte Simmler, is organized in collaboration with Gregoire Audo from Gilson Purification, and thanks to the support of the ASP organizing commitee. Three different presentations were proposed. You can access them here below!
Dr. Guy Harris
Independent Natural Products and Separations Consultant, Asbury, NJ, USA
Dr. Harris has spent his career working on the problems at the interface of chemistry and biology for the pharmaceutical industry and small startup companies. Guy has been involved in small molecule and protein separation for over 35 years; over 30 years of which has involved countercurrent separations (CS). Guy spent 22 years in the natural product chemistry department at Merck Research Labs (Rahway, NJ) in various capacities from research chemist to group leader. He then moved on to provide chemistry guidance and customer support for Dynamic Extractions, a CCC manufacturer based in the United Kingdom. Currently he is an independent consultant assisting with natural product chemistry and separations. He has over 100 publications and patents involving natural products.
PRESENTATION: Integrating Countercurrent Separations into Natural Product Purification Workflows. Countercurrent separations (CS) have been intertwined with natural products chemistry since the earliest days of the technique. Many of the problems presented by natural product isolation are well matched to the strengths of CS. Low amounts of target compound(s), complicated matrices arising from biological sources, and compound instability often result in difficult, complex purification problems whether the target is a macromolecule or complex secondary metabolite. Rarely can a natural product be purified in one step or even using just one chromatographic method. Therefore, a typical natural production isolation is a multistep process consisting of chromatographic methods having different separation mechanisms. It is helpful to view such purifications as a three-step process consisting of: 1) recovery and resolution; 2) purification; and 3) polishing. All chromatographic methods have strengths and weaknesses when viewed in this framework. This workshop will focus on how CS can be added to the natural product chemist’s toolbox for each step.
Gregoire Audo
Grégoire Audo received his Master Degree in Natural product purification and identification from Reims University in France in 2000 and his MBAin Nantes in 2002. Since that time he focuses his career to develop all aspects of CPC/CCC techniques within different companies. Gregoire has worked in collaboration with several academic and industrial research groups. Moreover, he gave multiple conferences in international scientific meetings to enhance the visibility and demonstrate the applicability of this liquid/liquid technology. From 2010 to 2017, he was manager of Armen instrument, a French company who developed and commercialized preparative LC instruments. Armen instrument was renamed Gilson Purification since its acquisition by the group Gilson®.
PRESENTATION: What CPC/CCC could bring to your natural compounds purification process ? Centrifugal Partition Chromatography (CPC) also knows as Countercurrent Separation (CS) is a support-free liquid–liquid chromatography based on the partitioning of solutes between two non-miscible liquid phases. The lack of any solid support provides many advantages over conventional solid phase Liquid Chromatography (LC) such as high selectivity, high loading capacity, total recovery of the loaded sample and easy scale-up. CPC is used to perform rapid separation, isolation, or enrichment of various bioactive compounds from very complex matrices (e.g, botanical/bacterial extracts, fermentation broths). Furthermore, the versatility of CPC technology allows to target different objectives in term of applications, whether by compounds differing in polarities and concentrations, by diverse extract matrices, or by process development. Several examples of application will be presented to illustrate the flexibility and capacity of this technology.
Workshop Presentations
Additional videos on Shake-Flask Experiments
Adding Hexanes in a ChMWat (Chloroform/Methanol/Water) solvent system accelerates phase separation
Adding Hexanes in a terAcWat (Ter butylmethylether/acetonitrile/Water) solvent system accelerates phase separation.