Question

Suppose you steam distilled thyme, and found that the resulting oil possessed promising antibiotic activity. To determine which chemical is the active component, you need to separate the mixture. If the major components are the chemicals shown below, what technique could you use to purify 1 g of the oil and obtain a pure sample of each compound? Explain why your chosen technique would be successful. 2. 3 ОН thymol p-cymene linalool borneol

Are you able to use acid base extraction to solve separate these?

Answer 1

1.No we can not use acid base extraction to separate this mixture, because all compounds except p-cymene is having alcohol as a functional group. So if we use aqueous NaOH for making salt of alcohol will get salt of all three compounds except p-cymene and will go in aqueous layer. So we can not separate these compounds by acid base extraction.

2. We can separate this compounds by column chromatography because all compounds are having different structures and will come on different Rf values so we can purify this compound by column chromatography.