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Chirality plays a very important role in the development of new drugs. Chirality also plays an important role in flavor and fragrance chemistry. For example, menthol is a terpenoid alcohol with eight possible stereoisomers. It has been found that the (-)-menthol enantiomer possesses the intense cooling and clean, notable minty odor. The (+)-menthol enantiomer is less cooling and possesses a musty odor. This musty odor is also present in the racemic form of menthol. For this reason it is important that food chemists have individual isomers on hand to perform further studies on the beneficial or non-beneficial properties of the individual isomers. Flavor and fragrance compounds are typically purified by fractional distillation or glass column chromatography. Drawback to these methods is that they do not discern between chiral compounds and their enantiomers. GC preparative chromatography is also used but this method results in poor loading. The high temperatures increase the risk of product loss and decomposition resulting in an overall inefficient way to separate out these type of compounds. In this application note, we will show the feasibility of using SFC and a RegisPack Chiral Stationary Phase (CSP) in its ability to analytically separate Linalool and to prep out a small sample to establish purity and recovery of the individual enantiomers. Download |