Professional Documents
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Received 27 June 2006; received in revised form 7 September 2006; accepted 8 September 2006
Abstract
An approach for automated, continuous and rapid extraction of flavonoids from Saussurea medusa Maxim dried cell cultures has been developed
in a new-designed dynamic microwave-assisted extraction system. The main factors affecting the extraction process namely power of microwave
irradiation, liquid/solid ratio, flow rate of solvent and irradiation time were optimized. The yield of flavonoids reached 4.97% in 60 min under the
optimum microwave-assisted extraction conditions: 1200 W of radiation power, 50:1 (v/w) of the liquid/solid ratio, and 50 ml s1 of solvent flow
rate. The dynamic microwave-assisted extraction showed obvious advantages in short duration and high efficiency to extract flavonoids without
causing degradation of target components from the S. medusa dried cell cultures in comparison with the dynamic solvent extraction without
microwave assistance.
2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Dynamic microwave-assisted extraction; Flavonoids; Dynamic solvent extraction; Saussurea medusa Maxim; Plant cell cultures
1. Introduction
Saussurea medusa Maxim is one of the most important traditional medicinal plants in China and officially listed in the
Chinese pharmacopoeia. The most important bioactive compounds in this elite medicinal species are flavonoids including
rutin, jaceosidin, hispdulin and so on. These flavonoids have
shown significant scavenging of free oxygen radicals and antidecrepitude activity [1]. Owing to over-exploitation of the wild
plants for commercial purpose and the difficulty of cultivation,
S. medusa is now almost extinct and has been listed as the second
grade national protected wild plant in China [2]. In view of these
problems, production of bioactive flavonoids by S. medusa cell
cultures has considerable importance not only in the protection
of natural plant resources, but also in its potential commercial
interest [35].
Extraction is the first step for the recovery and purification
of bioactive phytochemicals from plant materials. A number of
Corresponding author at: National Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
100080, PR China. Tel.: +86 10 82622280; fax: +86 10 82622280.
E-mail address: czliu@home.ipe.ac.cn (C.-Z. Liu).
1369-703X/$ see front matter 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.bej.2006.09.004
80
The current research focused on the establishment of an efficient extraction process for flavonoids recovery from S. medusa
dried cell cultures in a new constructed microwave-assisted
extraction system, and the effects of microwave power, flow
rate of extraction solvent and amount of plant material on yield
of flavonoids were investigated as follows.
81
field, and directly influenced the microwave energy transfer process. Microwave energy was absorbed and dispersed by a larger
amount of the dried cell cultures, which disadvantaged to the
extraction process [15,16]. If the extraction was carried out under
high liquid/solid ratio, the concentration of flavonoids in extraction solution was low. It meant that more energy and time were
needed to condense the extraction solution in later separation
and purification process. Therefore, the liquid/solid ratio of 50:1
(ml:g) was suitable to reach the high yield of flavonoids from the
dried cell cultures. The amount of plant materials and the volume
of extraction solvent used in the microwave-assisted extraction
reported before were usually limited to a laboratory scale of
milligram and milliliter [17,18]. In the current experiment, the
amount of plant materials and the volume of extraction solvent
treated in one extraction cycle reached 40 g and 2 l, respectively.
The dynamic microwave assisted extraction presented here may
be useful for large-scale flavonoids recovery from S. medusa
dried cell cultures.
3.3. Effect of solvent ow rate
The extraction process was performed under the dynamic
state in the new constructed microwave-assisted extraction system where the extraction solvent and plant materials were mixed
homogenously. It was very important to test the influence of solvent flow rate on yield of flavonoids because the solvent flow rate
affected irradiation time of microwave on plant materials and
mass/heat transfer in the extraction system. As shown in Fig. 4,
the maximum yield of flavonoids reached 4.97% in 60 min at a
solvent flow rate of 50 ml s1 . At a higher solvent flow rate, the
dried cells were mixed well with extraction solvent, and then
mass/heat transfer during the extraction process was improved.
At a lower solvent flow rate, the mass transfer became worse
because the dried cells were deposited easily at the bottom of
each extraction tank and pipeline. Over-heating of plant materials leading to phytochemicals degradation and over-boiling of
the extraction solvent were observed.
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Fig. 4. Effect of solvent flow rate on yield of flavonoids from S. medusa dried
cell cultures in the dynamic microwave-assisted extraction system. Values are
means of triplicate standard deviation.
Fig. 6. HPLC chromatograms of the extracts from S. medusa dried cell cultures
by dynamic solvent extraction without microwave assistance (A) and dynamic
microwave-assisted extraction (B).
with solvent also resulted in the rupture of the plant cells and
release of intracellular products into the solvent quickly [20].
As shown in Fig. 6, the phytochemical profile of the extract
from S. medusa dried cell cultures with dynamic microwave-
assisted extraction was similar to that without microwave assistance. Of the 10 compounds extracted by microwave-assisted
extraction, only one compound (peak 8) was not detected in the
extract by dynamic solvent extraction without microwave assistance. The yield (indicated by peak area) of individual qualitative
compound in the extract by microwave-assisted extraction was
higher that in the dynamic solvent extraction without microwave
assistance (Fig. 7), such as rutin as a marked compound in S.
medusa dried cell cultures. The result showed that dynamic
microwave-assisted extraction has the capability to effectively
extract target components without causing degradation of target
components in the S. medusa dried cell cultures.
4. Conclusions
An optimized process for acceleration of flavonoids extraction from S. medusa dried cell cultures has been developed in a
newly designed dynamic microwave-assisted extraction system.
By comparing the dynamic microwave-assisted extraction with
dynamic solvent extraction without microwave assistance, the
dynamic microwave-assisted extraction showed obvious advantages in short extraction duration and high efficiency. It was
identified as the best extraction approach for flavonoids from
dried cell cultures of S. medusa, and also showed great potential
for large-scale industrial application to extraction of other plant
metabolites from cultured cells.
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