Determination of teicoplanin A2's partition coefficient in different liquid-liquid extraction systems

Abstract

Teicoplanin is one of the macrocyclic glycopeptide antibiotics, which is active against Gram-positive bacteria, and has attracted a lot of attention in the field of chiral separation recently. In this work, the partition coefficients and extraction ratio of teicoplanin in three different solvent systems were studied: conventional extraction, reactive extraction and reverse micelle extraction. With conventional solvent extraction, n-butanol demonstrated high partition coefficient for teicoplanin, but low extraction ratio because of its high solubility in water. Reactive extraction of teicoplanin showed the highest partition coefficient with almost 100% recovery in organic phase when tri-n-octylmethyl ammonium chloride (TOMAC) was used as extractant and pH value was above 5.0. A reverse micelle system, consisted of isooctane +10 mmol·L-1 TOMAC +1% n-octanol, also offered high separation factor for teicoplanin. The results are beneficial for the design of teicoplanin separation and purification process.