Extraction of thebaine from Papaver bracteatum Lindl. Capsule using supercritical fluid CO2

Papaver bracteatum Lindl. is an Iranian native plant. Papaver bracteatum has red flowers and deep leaves; the end of leaves close to sepals is black in color. The plant has a length of 20 to 120 centimeter, growing wild in nature.The capsules of this plant contain thebaine. Thebaine can be converted to different types of painkiller in a simple reaction. In this project for the first time, thebaine was extracted from Papaver bracteatum using super critical fluid with high efficiency. The extracted thebaine was separated and identified using high performance liquid chromatography with UV detector (HPLC-UV). To optimize the extraction condition, a central composite design was used after a 2n-1 fractional factorial design. This model predicted the extraction conditions i.e. 350 atm pressure, 35◦C temperature, static and dynamic time of 10 min and 40 min, respectively, and 100µL volume of modifier (ethanol). Under optimum condition, the efficiency of extraction was predicted to be 2.96%.