Isolation of Natural Products by Ion-Exchange Methods

The primary goal of many natural products chemists is to extract, isolate, and characterize specific analytes from complex plant, animal, microbial, and food matrices. To achieve this goal, they rely considerably on highly sophisticated and highly hyphenated modern instrumentation. Yet, the vast majority of modern instrumentation typically found in the laboratories of natural products chemists is founded on the simple principles of intermolecular forces to achieve separation. Ion-exchange chromatography (IEC) is, at heart, the most fundamental, and strongest, of these interactions and is considered a relatively inexpensive and effective medium in which to “clean-up” a sample. Additionally, IEC offers high recoveries of key analytes and offers the ability to modify the stationary and mobile phases in order to selectively “catch and release” compounds of interest.