RESUMO
Objective:To establish the HPLC fingerprint method for assessing the quality of Moutan Cortex, and to determine the contents of paeonol, paeoniflorin, gallic acid, hydroxyl-paeoniflorin and benzoyl-paeoniflorin of Moutan Cortex in different growth period. Methods:Diamonsil Plus C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm) was used with the mobile phase comprising acetonitrile-0.05% formic acid solution and the flow rate of 1.0 ml/min with gradient elution manner. The detected wavelength was 230 nm for paeoniflorin and benzoyl-paeoniflorin, 267 nm for gallic acid, 258 nm for hydroxyl-paeoniflorin and 274 nm for paeonol with temperature column of 25 ℃. Then putting chromatograms into Similarity Evaluation System for Chromatographic Fingerprint of Chinese Materia Medica (2012A) to evaluate the similarity of Moutan Cortex in different growth period; then putting peak area data into SPSS software for cluster analysis and the clustering effect was determined. Results:The HPLC fingerprints established with this method has 23 shared peaks and 5 of them were identified, namely, paeonol, paeoniflorin, gallic acid, hydroxyl-paeoniflorin and benzoylpaeoniflorin. The similarity of Moutan Cortex in different years was between 0.850-0.991. This method has good linear relation ( r≥0.999 5), RSDs of precision, stability tests and reproducibility were lower than 1.6% ( n=6). Different growth periods of Moutan Cortex have obvious influence on the concentration of five compounds. Conclusion:This method is useful to evaluate and discriminate Moutan Cortex at different growth periods so as toprovide scientific reference on the harvest,industrialization and evaluation of Moutan Cortex.