ISOLUTE® HM-N

When it comes time to purify your reaction mixture or natural product extract, you have a choice to make. Should you simply load your dissolved sample onto your flash column or take the extra step to adsorb your mix onto a sorbent and dry it before loading? The choice can have a major impact on your results.

In this post, I will share results of work I conducted in my lab, comparing liquid and dry loading a reaction mixture that containing eight major components.

This is an interesting question that does not have a straightforward answer. In fact, there are many materials that are potentially useful sorbents for dry loading crude mixtures. Some of the more popular are silica, diatomaceous earth (e.g. ISOLUTE® HM-N, Celite®), alumina, and Florisil®. The sorbent choice can influence your purification results because each of the available media have different chemistry and capacity. In most cases, sample/sorbent reactivity really is not a major concern, though it can occur. 

For chemists needing to purify natural product extracts or synthesis reaction mixtures flash chromatography is typically the tool of choice. In previous posts I have discussed various ways to optimize the purification to obtain the highest purity compounds with maximum load in minimal time.