High Throughput Natural Product Discovery

A technical article from Genevac is available that details how its HT-24 centrifugal evaporation system is assisting a commercial flavours and fragrance company in its quest to find and isolate novel flavour ingredients from nature.

Natural product derived discovery of novel flavour molecules is a highly complex process. Natural product sources yield complex extracts containing many components, which often do not lend themselves to processing and analysis. Conventionally, many steps of fractionation and evaluation are necessary until a compound is obtained from natural sources at the purity required for structural analysis. In the article a state of the art fractionation process using a Sepbox® Preparative HPLC - SPE system* and a Genevac® HT-24 centrifugal evaporator is described. The Sepbox enables two dimensional, preparative scale fractionation of natural products using high performance liquid chromatography – solid phase extraction (HPLC-SPE). In sequential HPLC-SPE / HPLC-SPE steps individual components are isolated from complex mixtures. Each separation run produced 320 samples of approximately 45ml volume.

A Genevac HT-24 Evaporator was chosen to dry the samples because of its high sample capacity, unique technology that eliminates cross contamination due to sample bumping and automated monitoring of temperature and pressure to prevent sample degradation. Able to evaporate 192 sample vials simultaneously the HT-24 took just two days to dry all the fractions ready for further liquid handling and testing.

Compact in design and offering a very high capacity for a wide range of sample formats including microplates, tubes, vials, fraction collector racks and Genevac’s hybrid HPLC blocks the HT-24 offers the versatility and productivity to assist chemists in high-throughput environments. The high-throughput design of the HT-24 allows up to 96 shallow-well microplates to be dried down at the same time, while capacity for standard 16 x 100mm fraction collector tubes is an outstanding 576 tubes per run. Benefiting from Genevac’s 20+ years of designing centrifugal evaporators the HT-24 is easy to use, reliable, robust and safe to both operator and sample integrity. Further aiding productivity the HT-24 includes facility for rapid defrosting, and pull-out sample shelves for easy loading and unloading.