ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT Gentiana veitchiorum Hemsl., Gentianaceae, a traditional Tibetan medicine, was used for the treatment of liver jaundice with damp-heat pathogen, as well as for headache and chronic pharyngitis. A rapid ultra-performance liquid chromatography, photodiode array detector, quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry method was developed for the fast and accurate identification and quantification of the chemical constituents of G. veitchiorum. In fact, eighteen compounds were detected and identified on the basis of their mass spectra, fragment characteristics and comparison with published data. Especially, the MS fragmentation pathways of iridoid glycosides and flavone C-glycosides were illustrated. Five compounds among them were quantified by UHPLC-PDA, including swertiamarin, gentiopicroside, sweroside, isoorientin, and isovitexin. The proposed method was then validated based on the analyses of linearity, accuracy, precision, and recovery. The overall recoveries for the five analytes ranged from 96.54% to 100.81%, with RSD from 1.05% to 1.82%. In addition, ten batches of G. veitchiorum from different areas were also analyzed. The developed method was rapid and reliable for both identification and quantification of the chemical constituents of G. veitchiorum, especially for simultaneous qualitative and quantitative analysis of iridoid glycosides and flavone C-glycosides.