A new application of an aqueous diphase solvent system in one-step preparation of polysaccharide from the crude water extract of Radix Astragali by high-speed counter-current chromatography

Polysaccharide's purification remains challenge to separation technology. Conventional methods involve time-consuming and complicated operations and always cause significant variation in the isolates’ chemistry. This paper reports an aqueous diphase solvent system, namely PEG1000–MgSO4–H2O, which succeeded in one-step CCC separation of a polysaccharide (43 mg) from the water extract (1.67 g) of Radix Astragali. The solvent composition was set as 12:16:72 (w/w/w) of which the lower phase was used as the mobile phase at a flow rate of 0.8 mL/min in a 1000 mL column. The purified polysaccharide bears an average molecular weight of 1095 kDa and consists of galacturonic acid (76.5%), galactose (7.7%), arabinose (4.2%) and glucose (5.0%). Methylation analysis result showed it was composed of 58.4% of 1,4-linked Glcp, 11.8% of T-linked Araf, 10.5% of T-linked Glcp, 9.1% of 1,4,6-linked Galp and 5.1% of 1,3,6-linked Galp, etc. This success shows a short way between the crude water extract and purified polysaccharides, which minimizes the chemical variation caused by purification methods.

► Aqueous diphase solvent PEG–MgSO4–H2O was optimized by a L9(34) orthogonal test.
► And succeeded in one-step CCC separation of Radix Astragali polysaccharide.
► Preparation of natural polysaccharides was greatly simplified.
► This new method minimizes the chemical variation caused by conventional methods.