The innovative solution proposed to refine and enhance the purity of organic molecules extracted from natural sources (plants, fruits, fungi, bacteria etc.) is based on the use of small Magnetic Particles or beads (MPs) functionalized with surfactants and ligands able to specifically bind only one class of target molecule. The magnetic separation is mainly designed to increase the purity of enriched solutions (>80%). It is suitable to further purify compounds blend in order to reach a grade of purity >95-98% with a low running cost. However, it can be set to work directly on raw material as well. The principle is based on the non-covalent binding of a specific organic molecule to a short ligand (e.g. oligopeptide, antibodies, metal ions and other chemical groups). Furthermore, by using MPs of different size it will be possible to use an additional scheme of separation based on different magnetic gradient. Indeed, MPs of different radius present different magnetic moments that can be used to selectively separate a specific compound by acting on the magnetic field strength.
The innovative facility consists of two main machineries:
1) The magnetic SEPARATOR. This device is the core part of the extraction facility. Indeed, extraction of non-magnetic ions with magnetic technique is not performed by none of state-of-the-art procedures. .The easy use and affordable cost of purification of this device make it a groundbreaking solution in the sector of desalination, phytochemicals preparation and other ions extraction.
2) The EXTRACTOR. This device is used only for the preparation of bioactive compound from plants. This machine is based on supercritical fluid (SF) extraction such as SF-CO2 that thanks to the low critical temperature of CO2 reduces the degradation of thermo-labile molecules. However, since each plant row materials present slight little differences other methods like microwave will also be used.