Water as Green Solvent: Methods of Solubilisation and Extraction of Natural Products—Past, Present and Future Solutions

Water is the ultimate green solvent, but it has a major flaw: it struggles to dissolve many natural compounds on its own. How do scientists overcome nature's stubbornness?

Water is universally hailed as the greenest solvent available on Earth. Yet, extracting or dissolving many natural products using water alone remains an incredibly challenging issue. Because countless compounds show stubbornly low water solubility, researchers have spent decades trying to tune water's properties and enhance its hidden solvent potential.

Early solutions began emerging in the early 2000s with the introduction of specialized solubilizers. In recent years, the scientific toolkit has expanded rapidly, offering innovative methods to ensure effective green extraction and solubilization. Even better, combining these green techniques unlocks surprisingly high extraction performances.

This review dives deep into the literature to present, compare, and analyze these promising methods. By examining how water can be enhanced with green solubilisers and advanced processes, science moves closer to mastering the extraction of natural products from bioresources.

Key Points

• Water is the greenest solvent but struggles with low solubility compounds
• Green solubilizers and methods have been developed since the early 2000s
• Combining green methods unlocks higher natural product extraction performances