Preparative high‐performance liquid chromatography: Isolation of natural chemical compounds for identification and characterization

Abstract The identification and characterization of natural products generally require the isolation of pure compounds employing chromatographic techniques associated with extensive sample preparation. Preparative high‐performance liquid chromatography often allows the isolation of simple and complex natural compounds by using little sample preparation or from crude extracts. Thus, this article discusses the main fundamentals of this powerful technique, as well as discusses several applications that show the isolation of natural products from plants, bacteria, fungi, and marine organisms (algae, ascidian, bacteria, sponges, and fungi).