Emerging Application and Reflections of Cell Membrane Chromatography in the Quality Control of TCM: application study on three herbal medicines

Cell membrane chromatography (CMC) was first proposed by Professor He in 1996. As one of bioaffinity chromatography technique, CMC was a simple and convenient technology to study the interactions of active components in traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) with membrane receptors in vitro, and screen active components from complicated TCMs. Recently, CMC technology was developed rapidly, which was widely applied in the discovery of lead compounds from nature product. Combining with our previous works in the analysis of the composition of complex substances, biochromatography and TLC bioautography for quality evaluation of TCM, a new holistic quality control strategy was proposed here, which could be summarized as the integration of screen (screening of quality control marker by CMC), macroscopic characterization (characterizing the chemical material basis by fingerprinting) and microscopic description (multi-component quantification). An antiplatelet aggregation activity related quality control method of salvianolic acids in Salviae Miltiorrhizae Radix Et Rhizoma (Danshen) were described here as an application example here. In this study, a platelet/CMC coupled with offline UPLC-QTOF-MS/MS system was built to screen antiplatelet activity components from aqueous extract of Danshen, which serve as an agent of antiplatelet aggregation in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Rosmarinic acid, lithospermic acid salvianolic acid B were identified as the potential antiplatelet activity components. Moreover, rosmarinic acid, lithospermic acid, salvianolic acid B, salvianolic acid C and danshensu were tested in platelet aggregation in vitro assay. The results suggested their retention time was closely related to the antiplatelet aggregation activities. Then rosmarinic acid, salvianolic acid B and lithospermic acid were selected as “quality control markers” to evaluated the quality of Danshen and related extract. This study provides a rapid, effective and novel bioactivity related quality control strategy method of TCM, as well as a new method for screening the potential antiplatelet activity components from Chinese herb medicines.