Isolation of achiral aliphatic acid derivatives from Piper kadsura using preparative two-dimensional chiral supercritical fluid chromatography

•A 2D cSFC system was constructed for achiral aliphatic acid separation;•29 and 71 peaks in two samples were orthogonally separated by the 2D cSFC system;•19 achiral components were collected and 2 compounds was identified by 2D cSFC. The separation of structural analogues in natural products has always been one of the challenges in separation science, where supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) with chiral stationary phases (CSPs) is an unconventional but potential solution. In this study, a preparative two-dimensional chiral SFC (2D cSFC) method that was established with two kinds of CSPs was applied in the isolation of the aliphatic acid derivatives in Piper kadsura (P. kadsura). The RPLC unseparated peaks of two samples A and B of P. kadsura were evenly scattered on the CSP-1 column while they clustered into two groups on the CSP-2 column by SFC. There was impressively complementary selectivity between CSP-1 and CSP-2, which were used for construction of 2D cSFC. The first dimension (1D) separation with CSP-1 fractionated the sample A into six parts by a heart-cutting method and the sample B into nine parts for a comprehensive 2D analysis; then 29 and 71 peaks were respectively found in these parts in the second dimension (2D) separation with CSP-2. Further through 2D preparative separation, 19 high purity components were obtained, and the chemical structures of two of them were confirmed, including a novel unsaturated aliphatic acid compound (8Z,10Z)-12-methoxyheptadeca-8,10-dienoic acid and a known octadecadienoic acid lactone Lactariolide. The 2D cSFC method presented the superiority of separating the achiral compounds of complex samples.