Recent advances in bio-affinity chromatography for screening bioactive compounds from natural products.

Natural products are one of the most important sources of leading compounds in drug discovery. Until now, rapid screening and identification of biologically active components from natural products remain a technical challenge. Bio-affinity chromatography (BAC) based approaches hold great promise in screening potential bioactive ligands from complex samples. In this review, we summarized recent development of BAC in natural products screening, with a particular emphasis on the reported bio-affinity stationary phases and chromatographic supports as well as the applications of BAC coupled with GC-MS or LC-MS.