SP Scientific's Genevac Series 3 HT-12 Centrifugal Evaporator has been cited in a recently published paper by the Natural Products Support Group, Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc. and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research as an important sample preparation tool in their extraction and pre-fractionation work to create a new natural product fractions library.
The US National Cancer Institute's Natural Product Repository is one of the world's largest, most diverse collections of natural products containing over 230,000 unique extracts derived from plant, marine, and microbial organisms that have been collected from biodiverse regions throughout the world. This national resource is available to the US research community for the screening of extracts and the isolation of bioactive natural products. However, despite the success of natural products in drug discovery, compatibility issues that make extracts challenging for liquid handling systems, extended timelines that complicate natural product-based drug discovery efforts and the presence of pan-assay interfering compounds have reduced enthusiasm for the high-throughput screening (HTS) of crude natural product extract libraries in targeted assay systems.
To address these limitations, a newly launched US program has been set-up to advance natural product discovery technologies and facilitate the discovery of structurally defined, validated lead molecules ready for translation. To do this the aim of the program is to create a pre-fractionated library from over 125,000 natural product extracts with the aim of producing a publicly-accessible, HTS-amenable library of more than 1,000,000 fractions. The process of natural product fractionation typically produces many samples from a single extract. These samples need then to be evaporated before storage or analysis. In the described protocol natural product extracts were fractionated using automated solid phase extraction before the individual fractions were dried at low temperatures using Genevac HT-12 centrifugal evaporation systems. The evaporator was chosen to dry the natural product samples because of its high-volume fraction drying capacity, unique technology that eliminates cross contamination due to sample bumping and automated monitoring of temperature and pressure to prevent sample degradation.
Available in 6- and 12-sample holder configurations, the evaporator represents the latest in solvent removal technology. Benefiting from an advanced scroll pump that delivers reliable deep vacuum down to 0.4mbar, and chamber heaters to protect the system from condensation, each Series 3 HT evaporator is able to efficiently and effectively dry or freeze dry samples. Designed with latest touchscreen technology and a sleek ergonomic design, the evaporator makes optimising evaporation processes effortless.
