Solvent Systems Used in Countercurrent Chromatography for the Purification of Diterpene Compounds

Diterpenes are isoprene-derived compounds, bearing four units of this building block on their fundamental core. The chemical diversity reported for this class of metabolites also gathers numerous biological activities such as antibacterial, antiviral, anticancer, and free radical scavenging effects. Thus, an effective method for solving complex natural products matrices is needed to obtain these compounds. Countercurrent chromatography is a feasible technique for this purpose. Therefore, a search for the main solvent systems used in the isolation of different diterpene backbones by countercurrent chromatography was aimed. Among sixty terpenoid-related gathered papers, forty-one brought diterpenes as target compounds, with a diversity of liquid-liquid biphasic systems reported for countercurrent chromatography separation in which hexane-ethyl acetate-methanol-water and its congeners were mostly applied, comprising 55.8% of all used solvent systems. Concerning the other gathered data, isocratic reversed phase elution showed suitability in the separation of hydrophobic compounds such as diterpenes, comprising 56.1% of the used elution modes, whereas both high-speed countercurrent chromatography and high-performance countercurrent chromatography appeared at chromatographic procedure, regarding hydrodynamic countercurrent chromatography as a powerful tool at bioactive diterpenes isolation.