Systematic and efficient separation of 11 compounds from Rhizoma Chuanxiong via counter-current chromatography–solid phase extraction–counter-current chromatography hyphenation

• A CCC–SPE–CCC system was developed.
• Trapping conditions of SPE were optimized.
• Five intractable compounds were separated by baseline through adopting recycling CCC.
• 11 compounds with large polarity difference were separated by running CCC only once.

A counter-current chromatography (CCC)–solid phase extraction (SPE)–CCC system with high preparative capacity was used to realize rapid one-run systematic separation of natural products, in which two six-port valves and the SPE cartridge served as the interface. In the orthogonal separation system, equal column volumes of TEB-300A and TEB-300B were employed for the first dimension (1st-D) and second dimension (2nd-D), respectively. An optimized solid-phase column (25 mm × 10 mm i.d.) packed with Oasis HLB materials acted as the trapping SPE column. The analyte-focusing effect of the trapping column associated with the considerable preparative capacities of 1st-D and 2nd-D using totally different solvent systems significantly facilitated this one-run systematic separation of natural product. Therefore, this proposed approach was successfully applied to isolate chemical compounds from the crude extract of Rhizoma Chuanxiong. As a result, 11 compounds with widely different polarities were separated by running CCC for only one time. More importantly, this hyphenated strategy could serve as a rapid and efficient systematic pathway for the separation of natural products.