Isolation of main compounds from Crocus savitus by SFC

There are many publications in the literature dealing with the extraction and analysis of saffron. [2 – 5] Usually, the components are isolated by reversed-phase liquid chromatography (RP LC). Typical solvents are water/acetonitrile or water/methanol mixtures. [2 – 5] As usual, the stationary phase is C18. The initial separation conditions are high water content, using gradients the content of organic solvent increases significantly over time to elute nonpolar compounds. Formic acid is often added to the mobile phase. [2 – 5]
Supercritical Fluid Chromatography (SFC) is a type of chromatography that uses supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) as one part of the mobile phase. Supercritical carbon dioxide has a high diffusion coefficient and a low viscosity, which makes it an excellent solvent for separating and analyzing compounds. SFC offers several advantages over other types of chromatography, including faster analysis times, lower solvent usage, and different selectivity. The SFC is an orthogonal technique compared to the RP-LC.

This application note presents the isolation of the main components of saffron threads using SFC with mass spectrometer (MS) coupling. Ionization of the analytes is performed by electron spray ionization (ESI).