JOURNAL OF ESSENTIAL OIL RESEARCH, vol.1, no.1, pp.26, 2011 (SCI-Expanded)
The separation of a few milligrams of a pure substance from a complex mixture of biological origin is often a matter of paramount importance in studies of volatile metabolites. The aim of our studies was isolation and
identification of volatile constituents with subsequent investigation for their biological activity: antibacterial, anticandidal, and antifungal. Specific applications studied in our work included the separation of important volatile enantiomeric compounds from essential oils using a PGC-FCS. The most striking advantage of a temperature programmed separation by PGC-FCS was the simultaneous separation of up to six target compounds from the mixture. This study canstituted part of TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Hesearch Council of Turkey) project on enatiomeric compound isolation from essential oil by a Preparative Fraction Collector (PFC) system. The increasing demand for the separation and production of enantiomerically pure compounds has become one of the most important analytical tasks that we perform. Due to the enormous separation power of capillary gas chromatography, we isolated terpene enantiomers from selected essential oils with high purity that ranged 95-99%. This system allowed us to separate and recaver sufficient quantities of individual target terpenoids, which were further separated using various chiral cdumns. After separation, we subjected purified campounds to biological assays for antifungal activity against plant pathogens, anticandidal and antibacterial activities using agar dilution/diffusion, micro-dilution broth assays in order to determine the biological activity of each isolated compounds.