Isolation of plastochromanol-8 from flaxseed oil by countercurrent separation methods

The naturally occurring antioxidant plastochromanol-8 (PC-8) is a member of the tocochromanol (vitamin E) family which features eight unsaturated isoprene units in the side chain compared to three in the case of γ-tocotrienol. Due to the lack of a commercially available PC-8 standard, we developed a route to gain relevant amounts of highly pure PC-8. Specifically, ∼320 g flaxseed oil was saponified and the bulky PC-8 was enriched by gel permeation chromatography. It followed countercurrent chromatography using the solvent system n-hexane/benzotrifluoride/acetonitrile (20:7:13, v/v/v). The final purification was achieved by centrifugal partition chromatography using the novel solvent system hexamethyldisiloxane/acetonitrile (1:1, v/v). This step provided ∼26 mg PC-8 (>99.5 %, according to HPLC, GC and NMR analysis). Two further, hitherto unknown minor tocochromanols (<1 % of PC-8) were detected and could be identified to be plastochromanol-7 (PC-7) and plastochromanol-9 (PC-9), i.e. tocochromanols with seven and nine unsaturated isoprene units, respectively, in the side chain.