BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Nat. Prod.
Sec. Isolation and Purification
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Approaches in Isolation and Purification: Balancing Efficiency and SustainabilityView all 6 articles
Workflow for the Isolation of Natural Product Secondary Metabolites Using Off-Line SPE Guided by Gradient Reverse-Phase Liquid Chromatography (LCSPE-fast)
Provisionally accepted
Lyamara M. O. Pavão1Marília F. Barbosa1
Ana Maria Soares Pereira1
Quezia B. Cass2
Adriana Aparecida Lopes1*- 1Universidade de Ribeirao Preto, Ribeirao Preto, Brazil
- 2Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The importance of natural products (NPs) as molecular libraries providing diverse three-dimensional structural features and serving as scaffolds for drug discovery is well recognized. However, the isolation of both targeted and untargeted secondary metabolites remains a major challenge in NP research, despite significant advances in analytical and biotechnological tools. To address this, we report a rapid and efficient method for the semipreparative isolation of secondary metabolites from NP extracts using offline C18 solid phase extraction (SPE) cartridges, guided by the retention profile of a reverse-phase liquid chromatography gradient (LCSPE-fast). LCSPE-fast proved to be fast, cost-effective, and yielded multi-milligram amounts of target-metabolite-enriched fractions (~0.40 g of chlorogenic acid and 0.03 to 0.103 g of 3,4-Di-O-caffeoylquinic acid) from Uncaria guianensis cultivated both in vitro and in situ.
Keywords: C18 SPE cartridge, Semipreparative separation, LC-UV analysis, HPTLC analysis, Uncaria guianensis
Received: 16 Oct 2025; Accepted: 30 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Pavão, Barbosa, Pereira, Cass and Lopes. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Adriana Aparecida Lopes
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.