Towards greener and more sustainable analytical approaches: Development of an integrative supercritical CO2-based multidimensional system for bioactive compound study in natural and biological samples

Chemical characterization is essential to the study of bioactive compounds in natural and biological samples but conventional preparative and analytical techniques are usually time, energy and solvent-intensive, posing environmental and health risks.

Supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) present an eco-friendly alternative due to its interesting physio-chemical properties. Prof.

Wests research group has been developing approaches involving supercritical CO2 for two decades, and recently developed an integrated system combining supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) and supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) for the on-line extraction and analysis of polar and non-polar bioactive compounds from plants.

Although feasible, such coupling is very challenging, especially when targeting compounds with a wide range of polarities.

The next step is thus to further improve the developed system and explore its applicability to other samples with different matrices and classes of compounds.

Specifically, the use of unified chromatography (UC), an advanced version of SFC, will be investigated to further expand the efficiency and potential scope of the system.

Since the interfacing of the two techniques is a major bottleneck preventing the system from reaching its full potential, finding innovative solutions to facilitate the extract transfer from the first to the second dimension is necessary.

An important part of this project will thus be devoted to investigating new interface modalities to address the compatibility problems and instrumental issues pertaining to this hyphenation.

To boost chromatographic separation power and facilitate structural elucidation, the potential of incorporating multidimensional (mD) separation steps while coupling the system with mass spectrometry (MS) will also be explored, to develop a novel on-line (mD-SFE)-(mD-SFC/UC)-MS system. Finally, the systems utility will be demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative analyses of real-life samples.