Fractionation of plant extracts by supercritical fluid extraction and direct introduction in capillary gas chromatography using a programmable temperature vaporizer

A simple procedure to improve the sensitivity achievable in the analysis of supercritical fluid extracts of complex matrices is proposed. The method involves the offline coupling of supercritical fluid extraction and gas chromatography (GC) in such a way that the glass liner of a programmed temperature vaporizer is placed after the separation vessels of the extraction module. The subsequent chromatographic analysis is simply achieved by direct introduction of the glass liner into the GC. The proposed procedure is also adequate to perform the fractionation of supercritical fluid extracts into different groups of compounds, thus allowing the performance of highly selective extractions.The authors gratefully acknowledge financial assistance from the Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, project PB95-0911.Peer reviewe