[soisports]

Not sure if I posted in the right place so here it is:

I need some help involving the purification and characterization of an unknown substance. The substance is from a plant aqueous extract and has inhibitory activity in cell culture (growth and cytokine-induced inflammation).

What would be some good preliminary techniques aimed at determing whether the compound is organic/inorganic, a protein/non-protein, a hormone or not... before continuing on with further purification?

Keep in mind that bio-activity has to be assured with each prep.

I came up with heating the sample + proteinase K for protein digestion to determine if the compound may be a protein. Perhaps defatting the sample would potentially rule out/in a hormone. What about an easy way of separating organics and inorganics? Phase separation?

Once I have a rough idea of the nature of the compound I can then employ further separation and purification techniques (HPLC...)

Thanks in advance for any help.

Sois