Preparative separation of quinolines by centrifugal partition chromatography with gradient elution

Centrifugal partition chromatography has been successfully applied to the separation of 2-alkylquinolines from liquid combinatorial synthesis crude samples. Original gradient elution using the ternary two-phase solvent systems heptane–water–acetonitrile and heptane–acetonitrile–methanol were used to separate them with high purity degrees. Part of the effluent was monitored with evaporative light scattering detection, for direct control, and the collected fractions were analyzed by thin-layer chromatography, GC, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and MS. It was thus possible to purify in one run more than 3 g of crude mixture using only 1.3 l of solvents to obtain more than 300 mg of several alkylquinolines homologues with 99% purity and in less than 7 h.