Molecular characterization of plants

Our team is now well known for the development of innovative methodologies aimed to extract, isolate and identify natural compounds from various plants.

This research is directly linked to the competitiveness cluster "Cosmetic Valley” in region Centre.

Thus we develop some rapid, cheap, non-polluting, efficient and robust methods for extraction such as pressurized solvent extraction (PFE), microwave assisted extraction (MAE), supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), solid phase micro-extraction (SPME) and headspace.

Microwave assisted extraction of plant material
Microwave assisted extraction of plant material

Centrifugal partition chromatography (CPC) allows extract fractionation or purification of compounds of interest at the semi- or preparative scale in view of performing biological activity tests, structural analyses or obtaining skeleton for pharmaco-modulation or cosmeto-modulation.

Phytochemical analysis of extract was carried out depending on the nature of targeted molecules developing optimized, complementary and efficient chromatographic methods with high performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC), liquid (HPLC), gas (GC) or supercritical fluid (SFC) chromatography.

Identification by HPTLC (High PerformanceThin Layer Chromatography) of molecular families present in plant extracts
Identification by HPTLC (High PerformanceThin Layer Chromatography) of molecular families present in plant extracts

Lastly identification of bioactive molecules is managed developing innovative coupling with mass spectrometry such as CPC/Tq MS/MS; UPLC/Q-TOF-HRMS, SFC/Q-TOF-HRMS ; HPTLC/Maldi-TOF.

Coupling CPC/HPLC/ DAD/MS:  Purification – Analysis – on-line Identification
Coupling CPC/HPLC/ DAD/MS:  Purification – Analysis – on-line Identification