Fast environment-friendly ball mill-assisted deep eutectic solvent-based extraction of natural products

• An fast environment-friendly extraction method was developed.
• Tanshinones were selected as target compounds to evaluate the extraction method.
• This research may fundamentally shape the future development of extraction.

A fast environment-friendly extraction method, ball mill-assisted deep eutectic solvent-based extraction, was used for the extraction of natural products from plants. In this study, tanshinones were selected as target compounds to evaluate the efficiency of the developed extraction method. Under the optimized experimental conditions, cryptotanshinone (0.176 mg/g), tanshinone I (0.181 mg/g), and tanshinone II A (0.421 mg/g) were extracted from Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge, and the developed method was found to be greener, more efficient, and faster than conventional, environmentally harmful extraction methods such as methanol-based ultrasound-assisted extraction and heat reflux extraction. The analytical performances including recovery, reproducibility (RSD, n = 5), correlation of determination (r2), and the limit of detection, with the ranges of 96.1–103.9%, 1.6–1.9%, 0.9973–0.9984, and 5–8 ng/mL, were respectively obtained. Application of ball mill-assisted deep eutectic solvent-based extraction may fundamentally shape the future development of extraction methods.