This volume contains reviews which are based on a symposium, given th at
the 30 meeting of The Phytochemical Society of North America, held at
Laval University in Quebec City, Canada on August 11-15, 1990. During
the past two decades, there have been major new developments in methods
which can be applied toward the isolation, separation and structure
determination of complex natural products. Therefore, the topic of this
symposium, "Modem Phytochemical Methods", is a very timely one. The
organizers of the symposium recognized that it would not be possible to
cover in detail all new advances in phytochemical methodology. It was
therefore decided to emphasize general reviews on recent developments of
major separation techniques such as high performance liquid
chromatography as well as supercritical fluid chromato- graphy. In
addition, advances in commonly used structure determination methods,
mainly NMR and MS, are reviewed. Other topics include methodo- logies of
micro-sampling for isolation and analysis of trichome constituents as
well as recent breakthroughs on biosynthetic studies of monoterpenes
using "enriched" basal cells of trichomes. The volume concludes with a
review of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) studies of
biologically active natural products. In Chapter I, K. Hostettmann and
his colleagues give a general review of recent developments in the
separation of natural products with major emphasis on preparative
separations of biologically active plant constituents. The authors
present a comparison of droplet countercurrent chromatography (OCCC)
with the highly rapid and more versatile centrifugal partition
chromatography (CPC).
