A green and efficient protocol for large-scale production of glycyrrhizic acid from licorice roots by combination of polyamide and macroporous resin adsorbent chromatography.

A green and efficient method for large-scale preparation of glycyrrhizic acid from licorice roots was developed by combination of polyamide and macroporous resin. The entire preparation procedure consisted of two simple separation steps. The first step is to use polyamide resin to remove licorice flavoniods from the licorice crude extract. Subsequently, various macroporous resins were tried to purify glycyrrhizic acid, and HPD-400 showed the most suitable adsorption and desorption properties. Under the optimized conditions, a large-scale preparation of glycyrrhizic acid from licorice roots was carried out. A 20 kg raw material produced 0.43 kg of glycyrrhizic acid using green aqueous ethanol as the solvent. The purity of glycyrrhizic acid was increased from 11.40 to 88.95% with a recovery of 76.53%. The proposed method may be also extended to produce large-scale other triterpenoid saponins from herbal materials.