Effective Separation Of Cichoric Acid From Echinacea Purpurea Extracts By Phase Transition Extraction Method

Echinacea purpurea (E. purpurea) is a native medicinal herb which belongs to Echinacea. It has the effect of immunomodulation, antimicrobial and antiviral activity. As one of the main components, cichoric acid has been demonstrated to have the immunostimulating activity and anti-inflammatory effect. Lots of research findings show that cichoric acid possesses the activity of antioxidant, free radical scavenging and antimicrobial. Also the use of cichoric acid as one of the most potent HIV-1integrase inhibitor has been widely reported. Currently, there is only low content of cichoric acid on sale in the market of China. For the lack of a simple and efficient approach to produce highly purified cichoric acid in large quantities. Hence, the wide clinical application of cichoric acid has been hindered.The paper investigates the partition laws that induced by soluble salt in blank ACN/water system. The separation and purification of cichoric acid from E. purpurea by phase transition extraction is studied. Also with the help of adsorption and clarification technology, and the phase transition extraction, cichoric acid in product with higher content is prepared. The details are summarized as the following three parts.1. Based on the phenomenon that salts induce phase separation of ACN/water system, the fundamental laws of that phase separation induced by soluble salt in blank ACN/water system are systematically investigation. A conception of "Recovery ACN phase"(R) is introduced to preliminarily evaluate the ability of phase separation. Then the factors contain the unsaturation of salt, the pH value of sample and the temperature is investigated. Thus, we get the partition laws of salts induced phase separation in ACN/water system. 2. Under the guidelines got from the former capture, the fundamental laws of salts induced phase separation is applied to separation and purification of cichoric acid. The raw material is the E. purpurea extracts in which the cichoric acid content is3.6%. Under the optimum conditions, the content of cichoric acid in product comes up to28%.3. The clarifier including chitosan, ZTC1+1and nano silica is applied in E. purpurea to remove impurities. The adsorption ability of both the impurities and cichoric acid are studied. Then, the E. purpurea extracted solution is firstly manipulated by the nano-silica clarifier to separate impurities in the optimized conditions. And secondly, the clear supernatant is treated with the phase transition extraction. Then, the ACN phase is dealt with phase transition extraction again. And finally, the cichoric acid is separated in large scale, and the content of cichoric acid in product reaches48%.