Borrelidin Analysis

Borrelidin, until recently, has been extracted through common traditional methods. These methods depend on the physicochemical properties of the drug, like size, solubility and polarity. Moreover, full purification using these methods requires multiple steps of separation, concentration and analysis to be achieved. This often yields a low percentage of the drug due to significant loss with other components as well as sample degradation.
In general, the concept of chromatography is to separate compounds in a mixture, where there is a stationary phase and a mobile phase. The process of obtaining borrelidin starts with column chromatography using silica gel. Column chromatography is a technique that separates chemical from a mixture of substances. The stationary phase is silica gel, and the

Large molecules in a solution will bypass it since they are too large to fit or adsorb to the pores. On the other hand, smaller molecules will get trapped in the pores, thus leaving the column at a much smaller rate than the larger molecules. In borrelidin, the filtrate was extracted with ethyl acetate. This filtrate then underwent gel filtration chromatography, where the stationary phase here is Sephadex LH-20, a soft gel used to separate proteins, and the mobile phase, also known here as the elution solvent, is methanol. The last step in the traditional purification of borrelidin is reverse phase chromatography. In this process, the mobile phase is aqueous (polar), and the stationary phase is a non-aqueous (non-polar) solid. Any hydrophobic compound in the polar phase will adsorb to the stationary hydrophobic phase. The stationary column used here is a C18 bonded silica HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography). After those three chromatography steps, only 2-3 mg of borrelidin were obtained, in comparison to the amount obtained through the chemoselective