Separation of Mixtures of Rutin and Quercetin: Evaluating the Productivity of Preparative Chromatography

The flavonoid rutin is present in significant amounts in the flower buds of Sophora japonica L. It offers numerous desired pharmacological effects. Under certain extraction conditions quercetin is found as a hydrolysis product which needs to be separated from rutin. This paper describes the application of liquid chromatography to solve this task. Based on the determination of adsorption equilibrium constants and column efficiencies, the productivity of the separation process is estimated, and scale-up considerations are presented. A comparison with alternatively directly crystallizing rutin from raw extracts is also reported.