Quality Control of Botanicals through Identification and Quantification of Multiple Characteristic Components by Utra-Fast HPLC-DAD-ELSD and LC-TOF/MS

Over the last decades, the usage of botanicals for herbal medicines has expanded globally. Safety and efficacy as well as quality control of botanicals-derived products have become important concerns. Addressing these topics usually relies on validated analytical methods, which allows rapid and sensitive identification and quantification of relevant constituents. Botanicals are complex mixtures consisting of thousands of compounds, and getting useful chemical information from these highly complicated matrixes has long been one of the major challenges to chemists and analysts. In this report, we introduced two most potential and prospective methods for quality control of botanicals, i.e., ultra-fast HPLC-DAD-ELSD method and ultra-fast HPLC-TOF/MS method. This report includes three important aspects: (i) We applied ultra-fast HPLC system to routine analysis and quality control of botanicals, providing up to 5–20 times faster analysis and 60% higher resolution than conventional HPLC without sacrificing resolution, precision or sensitivity (Fig. 1). (ii) We connected UV/DAD with ELSD for simultaneous determination of various compounds in one run. UV could detect strong UV absorbing compounds such as isoflavonoids, phthalides, and phenolic acids, while as a complementation role, ELSD could detect non- or poor UV absorbing compounds such as saponins (Fig. 2). (iii) We suggest that TOF-MS provides much higher sensitivity and selectivity, as well as accurate mass measurement. It enables the simultaneous identification and determination of compounds in botanicals even with trace contents. Acknowledgements: Financial support for this research from the National Science Foundation of China (No. 90709020, 30530870) is gratefully acknowledged.

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