at Google ScholarTitle data
Sperling, Sergej ; Kühbandner, Stephan ; Engel, Katharina C. ; Steiger, Sandra ; Stökl, Johannes ; Ruther, Joachim:
Size Exclusion High Performance Liquid Chromatography : Re-Discovery of a Rapid and Versatile Method for Clean-Up and Fractionation in Chemical Ecology.
In: Journal of Chemical Ecology.
Vol. 41
(2015)
Issue 6
.
- pp. 574-583.
ISSN 1573-1561
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10886-015-0584-8
Abstract in another language
Solvent extraction of bioactive molecules from glands, tissues, or whole organisms is a common first step in chemoecological studies. Co-extraction of a surplus of high boiling materials such as triacylglycerides (TAGs) and other lipids with higher molecular weight might hamper the identification of volatile or medium-volatile semiochemicals by high resolution chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques. Therefore, effective clean-up procedures are needed to separate potential semiochemicals from the accompanying materials. Size exclusion high performance liquid chromatography (SE-HPLC), a technique often disregarded by chemoecologists, has proved to be a rapid and efficient clean-up method for complex crude extracts. We demonstrated that TAGs can be baseline separated from typical semiochemicals within less than 10 min on a porous gel stationary phase based on highly cross-linked polystyrene/divinylbenzene. We applied the method as a rapid one-step clean-up procedure for the analysis of juvenile hormone III in insect hemolymph by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. We furthermore introduced some recent application examples on insect pheromones to demonstrate that SE-HPLC is not only an effective method for the purification of crude extracts, but can as well be used as a first fractionation step for the bioassay-guided identification of behavior modifying natural products. SE-HPLC can be well operated with low-boiling solvents such as dichloromethane, and results in fraction volumes of typically less than one ml, which decreases the danger of losing volatile analytes during subsequent concentration steps.