A New Method For Extracting Lovastatin From Red Kojic Rice

In recent years, cardiovascular disease is becoming more and more threatening to human health. According to the statistics, death caused by cardiovascular disease is the second among the disease, next to malignant tumor. Lovastatin, an efficient medicine, has been gradually used to treat cardiovascular disease.In this paper, solvent A and reflux apparatus was used to extract lovastatin from red kojic rice, and the concentration of solvent A, extracting temperature, solid-liquid ratio and extracting time were reached. It was revealed by the results of L9 (34) orthogonal test that the optimum terms were the concentration of solvent A was 65%, extracting temperature was 50℃,solid-liquid ratio was 6:1 and extracting time was 4h, under the terms mentioned above, the extraction yield could reach 8.18%, accounting 76.52% of the total content of red kojic rice.After the process of extracting, ultrafiltration was carried out to get rid of some giant molecules like proteins and polyoses, results showed most giant molecules could be removed using 30k ultrafiltration membrane. In the resin purifying process, single factor experiments showed that the best injection rate is 1.5BV/h, the optimum eluent is alcohol, and the concentration is 65%, the optimum amount of eluent is 2.5BV. The eluents colleted was decolorized by activated carbon and analyzed by TLC and HPLC, the TLC analysis showed that there were two kinds of substances. HPLC also showed that there were mainly two kinds of substances in eluents.Silica gel column chromatography was used to separate the two substances mentioned above, then they were characterized by UV and IR spectrum, the results indicated that the substance with Rf value of 0.53 was mevinolinic acid, and the other was lovastatin. Then the conversion of mevinolinic acid and lovastatin was researched, and the conversion of mevinolinic acid could reach as high as 90% by refluxing in the medium of Ethyl acetate in the presence of molecule sieves. At last, simple economic evaluation was implemented; the result showed that the technique could bring many social and economic benefits to the enterprise.