particles have the size of 1–2 mm and a lot of macropores observable with the naked eye. As shown in Fig. 4(c), the pore size distribution measured from the mercury porosimetry was in good agreement with the size distribution of PS nanoparticles. The specific surface area and pore volume of macroporous silica were summarized in Table 1. The silica particles prepared by using 44 nm PS and 86 nm PS have the specific surface area of 83 m2 /g and 26 m2 /g, respectively. 3.2. Purification performance of adsorbents The performance of silica adsorbents prepared by the spray pyrolysis was carried out for the purification of paclitaxel from the crude extracts in which the purity of paclitaxel was10.6% according to the HPLC analysis. The results for the adsorbent treatment were displayed in Fig. 5 and summarized in Table 1. It was clear that the adsorbent treatment before the hexane precipitation process could lead to the increase of the paclitaxel purity no matter what the kinds of adsorbents. But, the purification efficiency depends on the kinds of adsorbents used. Although the mesoporous silica S1 sample had the largest specific surface area, the purification efficiency was lowest among the adsorbents used in this work. Even if the specific surface area was not largest, the macroporous silica (S3) with the pore size of 44 nm showed the better purification performance than the mesoporous silica of high surface area (S1 and sylopute). Also, the macroporous silica S2 having the smallest surface area had a similar purification performance with the mesoporous silica S1 with the largest surface area. Those results indicate that the larger surface area of adsorbents does not always guarantee the better performance for the removal of the tar and waxy compounds in the crude extracts. On the other hand, the performance of adsorbents strongly