Development of rat urinary HPLC-UV profiling for metabonomic study on Liuwei Dihuang Pills

Since urine contains thousands of metabolites, there are no universal analytical techniques to analyze these compounds simultaneously. Therefore, a readily obtained and simple sample pretreatment high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with ultraviolet (UV) detection urinary profiling with good reproducibility was developed for metabonomic study in this paper. The results of current study clearly showed that there were different phenotypes of metabolites based on HPLC-UV urinary profiling after administration of Liuwei Dihuang Pills (LWPs) or Carrageenan-stimulated inflammation model, and those could be conveniently discriminated by principal component analysis (PCA). In addition, the results also showed that LWPs could restore the metabolite network that disturbed by inflammation, which would be a proof of therapeutic efficacy of LWPs to inflammation by metabonomics study. Our study indicated that HPLC-UV method could be used as a potentially powerful tool for urinary profiling on metabonomic studies.