Designing green and recyclable switchable supramolecular deep eutectic solvents for efficient extraction of flavonoids from Scutellariae Radix and mechanism exploration

•Synthesis of a novel SS-DES for enrichment of flavonoids in Scutellariae Radix.•Investigation of its antioxidant activity, cytotoxicity and ecological impact.•Extraction mechanism was studied by DFT and molecular docking.•The method displays merits of green, sensitive and efficient. A green and recyclable switchable supramolecular deep eutectic solvent (SS-DES) was designed and prepared for effective extraction of flavonoids from Scutellariae Radix. The novel SS-DES has both excellent extraction performance of DES and the host guest inclusion of cyclodextrin, thereby showing superior extraction efficiency and selectivity. The characteristic of polarity switching can endow the SS-DES with achieving homogeneous extraction and rapid two-phase separation, shorting per-treatment time largely. Parameters affecting the extraction performance were investigated by the response surface methodology. The results indicated that the SS-DES showed better extraction yield of total flavonoids (157.95 mg/g) compared with pure DES (135 mg/g) and traditional organic solvent (60 % ethanol, 104.87 mg/g). Moreover, the switching mechanism of SS-DES was characterized by FT-IR and 1H NMR, and the extraction mechanism was studied by density functional theory and molecular docking analysis. After evaluating the ecological impact of the method, the cytotoxicity of SS-DES was investigated and the result displayed that its toxicity was very low or even negligible with the EC50>2000 mg/L. After being adsorbed by macroporous AB-8 resin, the regenerated SS-DES was recycled 5 times and the extraction efficiency still remained above 90 %, indicating the desirable reusability. Therefore, the proposed method was efficient and sustainable, and revealed favorable application prospect for the extraction of bio-active compounds from plant materials.