Applications of Biochromatography in the Screening of Bioactive Natural Products

Searching for bioactive compounds from natural resources such as plant materials has become a focus for study. Several models, such as animal (biofluid, organ and tissue) and cellular (several kinds of cell lines), have traditionally been used for this purpose. As a fast, economic and effective way to identify or predict bioactive com-pounds in complex matrices, biochromatography has developed rapidly during the past years. Combing the properties of traditional chromatography and biomaterials, biochromatographic analysis pos-sesses features of simultaneous screening, separation and struc-tural identification for active compounds in a complex matrix. According to the process, biochromatography can be divided into offline and online approaches. For offline bioextraction, the bioma-terials are used as the extraction phase and followed by routine chromatographic analysis. For online biochromatography, the bio-materials are directly used as the stationary phase for chromato-graphic analysis. This paper reviews the applications of offline bioextraction followed by chromatographic analysis and online bio-chromatography, including molecular, cell membrane and cell, and artificial biomembrane chromatography in the screening or predict-ing active compounds from natural sources