Preparation of the high purity gingerols from ginger by dummy molecularly imprinted polymers

• Dummy molecularly imprinted polymers for gingerols were firstly proposed.
• N-vanillylnonanamide was synthesized as dummy template.
• The DMIPs had high affinity and selectivity to three gingerols.
• Gingerols obtained by DMIP-SPE column displayed excellent scavenging activity.

In this work, a dummy molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) were developed as the selective sorbents for preparation of the high purity gingerols from ginger for the first time. The dummy template molecule with similar structural skeleton to gingerols, N-vanillylnonanamide, has been designed and synthesized. The performance of the MIPs and non-imprinted polymers (NIPs) were evaluated including selective recognition capacity, adsorption isotherm, and adsorption kinetics. Optimization of various parameters affecting dummy molecular imprinted solid phase extraction (MISPE), such as the type and flow rate of the loading solvent, the composition and volume of the eluting solvent, and the composition and volume of the washing solvent were investigated. Gingerols with the percent recovery of 80 and the percent purity of 99.1 were obtained from the extracts of ginger by MISPE. Besides, gingerols obtained by MISPE had more powerful activity of eliminating free radical compared with extracts before extraction with the MISPE column. Application of MIPs with a high affinity toward three gingerols provides a novel method for obtaining a group of compounds which have likely active groups from natural products.