Natural Product Isolation: An Overview

There has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in natural product research over the last decade or so. With the outstanding developments in the areas of separation science, spectroscopic techniques, and microplate-based ultrasensitive in vitro assays, natural product research is enjoying renewed attention for providing novel and interesting chemical scaffolds. The various available hyphenated techniques, e.g., GC-MS, LC-PDA, LC-MS, LC-FTIR, LC-NMR, LC-NMR-MS, CE-MS, have made possible the preisolation analyses of crude extracts or fractions from different natural sources, isolation and on-line detection of natural products, chemotaxonomic studies, chemical finger printing, quality control of herbal products, dereplication of natural products, and metabolomic studies. While different chapters in this book are devoted to a number of specific aspects of natural product isolation protocols, this chapter presents, with practical examples, a general overview of the processes involved in natural product research, starting from extraction to determination of the structures of purified products and their biological activity.