Countercurrent Chromatography is briefly called C.C.C. It's a new kind of separation technique based on liquid-liquid partition. The most distinctive feature of this technique is free of any solid support matrix or carrier. CoMPared with other conventional chromatographic techniques, it will not encounter such troubles: irreversible adsorptive loss, denaturalization, contamination, tailing peak etc. It can be used for separating molecules ranged from small ones to big ones, even some biopolymers. High Speed Countercurrent Chromatography (HSCCC) is developed from C.C.C .It not only significantly shortens the time of separation procedure, but also increases the resolution and preparative ability.

Applications of HSCCC:

• Separation and purification of natural bioactive molecules
• Separation and purification of synthesized compounds
• R&D of novel drugs
• Fingerprint and quality control research of Traditional Chinese Medicine
• Separation and purification of antibiotics
• Separation and purification of the active composition of marine organisms
• Separation and purification of proteins and polypeptides
• Chiral separation
• Preparative separation sample from mg to g scale
• Extract the desired component from a crude sample
• Concentrate small amount of chemicals from a large volume of solvent
• Used as a main or aided analytical tool
• Separation of radioisotope

Now HSCCC has become a more and more important role in the field of herbal medicines research. CoMPared with other preparative-scale chromatography techniques, it has these advantages of separating natural products:

• Rapid and convenient
• Higher separation degree than conventional chromatography techniques
• Need not strict pretreatment to the sample
• Broad liquid-liquid partition solvent systems for chosen
• Eliminate the loss, contamination and denaturalization caused by solid support carriers
• High recovery rate