Pursuing Scientific Intersts (PSI) is an organization at the College of Wooster whose purpose is to provide support for students majoring in science. Students of all majors, as well as faculty, are welcome at any meeting.

PSI meets weekly for dinners from 5:45 -6:45 pm of every Monday of the fall and spring semester.

Meetings are in Lowry faculty lounge. Bring your tray and join us!

Capsaicinoids, N-vanillyl acyl amides, are the "hot" components of chili peppers (genus Capsicum), many spicy foods, some topical pain-relief creams, and most defense sprays. More than twenty naturally-occurring capsaicinoids are known with small, but significant differences in structure. Only three of the compounds are available commercially in pure form. The goal of this research is to develop a method for the isolation of milligram quantities of individual capsaicinoids from chili pepper that may serve as analytical standards for other studies of the capsaicinoids.

The first stage of the process involves argentation solid phase extraction that provides very good separation of the capsaicins (the group of capsaicinoids that contain a double bond in the acyl portion of the molecule) from the non-capsaicins (no double bond). Silver ion complexes with alkenes, and, thereby, the capsaicins are retained more strongly on a silver-loaded strong cation exchange resin. The non-capsaicins elute with moderately polar solvents, while only polar solvents can remove the capsaicins. Current work seeks to improve and optimize this initial separation step for use with milligram amounts of capsaicinoids.

The second stage of the process employs semi-preparative liquid chromatography to separate the individual capsaicins from each other and also the individual non-capsaicins from each other. The separation on a C30 phase has been optimized to provide the necessary chromatographic resolution of the two mixtures. Individual capsaicinoids will be isolated by collection of the chromatographic eluate at specific retention times, followed by C18 solid phase extraction and evaporation of the solvent. Confirmation of the identities of the separated materials and their purities ultimately depends on NMR spectrometry and comparison to reference NMR spectra obtained in our laboratory

Updated on 01/19/2006
Questions/Comments: Andrea Freshwater (afreshwater (at) wooster.edu)