[Methods of advanced purification-the challenge for biosynthetic antibiotics industry]

Reactive extraction, permeation through liquid membranes and direct extraction are some of the new techniques applied for separation and advanced purification of biosynthetic antibiotics. Compared with the conventional separation techniques, the main advantages of these extraction methods are: high separation efficiency, the avoidance of antibiotics chemical and thermal inactivation, high purity of obtained antibiotics. Furthermore, using reactive extraction or permeation through liquid membrane, the antibiotics can be selective separated from their biosynthesis precursors or from the secondary biosynthetic compounds. This paper is a review on separation of Penicillins and Erythromycin by means of these extraction techniques, being underlined their advantages, applications and problems concerning the separation process scale-up.