Separation methods for pharmacologically active xanthones

Xanthones, as a kind of polyphenolic natural products with many strong bioactivities, are attractive for separation scientists due to the similarity and diversity of their structures resulting in difficult separation by chromatographic methods. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and thin layer chromatography (TLC) are traditional methods to separate xanthones. Recently, capillary electrophoresis (CE), as a micro-column technique driven by electroosmotic flow (EOF), with its high efficiency and high-speed separation, has been employed to separate xanthones and determine their physicochemical properties such as binding constants with cyclodextrin (CD) and ionization constants. Since xanthones have been used in clinic treatment, the development of chromatographic and CE methods for the separation and determination of xanthones plays an essential role in the quality control of some herbal medicines containing xanthones. This article reviewed the separation of xanthones by HPLC, TLC and CE, citing 72 literatures. This review focused on the CE separation for xanthones due to its unique advantages compared to chromatographic methods. The comparison of separation selectivity of different CE modes including capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE), micellar electrokinetic chromatography (MEKC), microemulsion electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MEEKC) and capillary electrochromatography (CEC) was discussed. Compared with traditional chromatographic methods such as HPLC and TLC, CE has higher separation efficiency, faster separation, lower cost and more flexible modes. However, because of low sensitivity of UV detector and low contents of xanthones in herbal medicines, CE methods have seldom been applied to the analysis of real samples although CE showed great potential for xanthone separation. The determination of xanthones in herbal medicines has been often achieved by HPLC. Hence, how to enhance CE detection sensitivity for real sample analysis, e.g. by on-line preconcentration and CE-MS, would be a key to achieve the quantitation of xanthones.