Quality control research of Yuye Qinghuo Tablets by UPLC MS/MS multicomponent determination coupled with chemical pattern recognition / 中草药

ABSTRACT

Objective: To establish the UPLC-MS/MS method for the simultaneous determination of 10 active components (geniposidic acid, chlorogenic acid, shanzhiside methyl ester, 3,5-O-dicaffeoylquinic acid, geniposide, mussaenoside, β-ecdysone, andrographolide, wedelolacton, and dehydroandrographolide) in Yuye Qinghuo Tablets (YQT), in order to make a systemic, comprehensive, and scientific quality evaluation of the drug combined with the chemical pattern recognition method. Methods: The chromatographic separation was achieved on Agilent Zorbax SB C18 (50 mm × 3.0 mm, 1.8 μm); The mobile phase was consisted of methanol-0.1% acetic acid (containing 20 mmol/L ammonium acetate) at a flow rate of 0.3 mL/min with gradient elution, the mass spectrum was scanned by ESI+ and ESI- multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode. And the content analysis was carried out by cluster analysis (CA), principal component analysis (PCA), and orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) to comprehensively evaluate the difference in quality of YQT. Results: Under the optimized conditions, 10 components showed good linear relationships in the ranges of 0.352 5—14.100 0, 5.402—270.100, 0.205 8—8.232 0, 1.050—42.020, 4.020—160.800, 4.328—173.100, 2.044—204.400, 2.251—225.000, 0.232 8—9.312 0, and 4.708—188.300 μg/mL, respectively (r > 0.999 1), whose average recoveries were 95.02%—99.66% (RSD < 3.0%). The analysis results showed that the quality of the most batches was stable. However, it was found that there were still slight differences in the quality of different batches of drugs by CA and PCA. Finally, six symbolic components causing the quality differences among batches were screened out by OPLS-DA, they were andrographolide, dehydroandrographolide, mussaenoside, shanzhiside methyl ester, 3,5-O-dicaffeoylquinic acid, and chlorogenic acid, respectively. Conclusion: This simple, sensitive, and efficient method can be used for the rapid determination of main active components in YQT. The analysis of results combined with the chemical pattern recognition technology can comprehensively evaluate the drug quality as a whole, which provide new scientific basis and data processing methods for the quality control research of YQT.