Notice of RetractionPreparation of High-Purity Essential Linoleic Acid from Safflower Seed Oil by Argentated Silica Gel Chromatography Column

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

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For hundreds of years, safflower seed oil has been used in folk medicine for inflammatory skin disorders. In its natural state, the oil contains high levels of essential fatty acids (EFA), particularly linoleic acid (LA), which has several pharmaceutical properties. Safflower seed oil is a nice resource of linoleic acid with a content of 69.5% of the total fatty acids. Linoleic acid is an essential fatty acid, whose absence in a normal diet has been described as responsible for the development of a wide variety of diseases. Highly purified LA is required on pharmaceutical products and it can be produced through urea inclusion and column chromatography. This work reports as recovery of highly purified linoleic acid from safflower seed oil by means of a process, which involves safflower seed oil saponification, followed by concentration of the fatty acids by urea inclusion adducts method. Thereafter, the fatty acids were methylated and linoleic acid methyl ester was purified by using argentated silica gel column chromatography. The recovery in the combined process was 77%, and the final purity was 96.7% The suitability of a single procedure without urea inclusion fractionation was also studied and compared.