Simultaneous quantification of 16 bioactive constituents in Common cnidium fruit by liquid...

A novel quantitative method using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry was developed for simultaneous determination of the 16 important bioactive constituents including nine coumarins, and seven flavonoids in Common cnidium fruit samples from different regions. The separation was performed on a C18 column with linear gradient elution of acetonitrile and 0.1% acetic acid at a flow rate of 1.0 ml/min in 15 min. Quantification of the analytes was achieved by use of a hybrid quadrupole linear ion-trap mass spectrometer. Multiple-reaction monitoring scanning was employed with switching electrospray ion source polarity between positive and negative modes in a single run. The validation results of the method indicated that the method was simple, rapid, specific, and reliable. The results demonstrated that the quantitative difference in content of 16 bioactive constituents was useful not only for chemotaxonomy of many samples from different sources but also for the standardization and differentiation of many similar samples. Simultaneous quantification of bioactive components by high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometric method would be a well acceptable strategy to comprehensively control the quality of C. cnidium fruit.