[Fri. 30 Oct. 2017] Prof. Igor Rodin/Department of Chemistry, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

“Unified strategy for HPLC-MS evaluation of

bioactive compounds in herbal products”

Safety, quality and composition evaluation of herbal products and food supplements based on botanical ingredients are of major concern, as they have usually not been through a pharmaceutical testing system as required for the approval of therapeutic phytopreparations. For screening of botanicals in herbal food supplements multi-targeted and group-targeted approaches may be applied. In both cases liquid chromatography coupled with a hybrid triple quadrupole linear ion trap mass spectrometry can be used. In the group-targeted approach botanicals are characterised by means of appropriate group of structurally related biomarkers instead of multi-targeted approach where the number of selected analytes is monitored based on multiple reaction monitoring survey. Therefore unified strategy for isolation, chromatographic separation and mass spectrometric detection and data handling should be employed for as many active compounds from herbal products as possible.

In this terms, isolation techniques for these compounds should be adopted for extraction of polar and less polar analytes, such as protodioscin and dioscin from T. terrestris, ginsenosides Rg1, Rb1, Re, Rb2 and Rg3, C-K, Rh2 from P. ginseng, salidroside and rosavin, rosarin from R. rosea etc. Therefore extraction parameters should be optimized for both polar and less polar biomarker compounds using single-factor or multi-factor experiments with different solvent systems. An efficient strategy for HPLC-MS group-targeted analysis of such extract was developed for comprehensive evaluation of chemical composition of plants intensively used for herbal product manufacturing. In this approach not only most studied biomarker compounds could be determined in single ion monitoring mode for characteristic group fragment ions but also their analogues and overall content. The sensitivity of this simple approach on the level of 10-50 ng/mL is higher than of existing HPLC-UV quality control methods which are not convenient for several groups of herbal constituents such as steroids and triterpenoids.

This work was supported by Russian Science Foundation (Grant No. 17-13-01146) for Moscow State University.