Optimization and Assessment of Three Different High Performance Liquid Chromatographic Systems for the Combinative...

Chromatographic separation is still a critical subject for the quality control of traditional Chinese medicine. In this study, three different high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) systems employing commercially available columns packed with 1.8, 3.5 and 5.0 μm particles were respectively developed and optimized for the combinative fingerprint analysis and multi-ingredients quantification of Sangju Ganmao tablet (SGT). Chromatographic parameters including the repeatability of retention time and peak area, symmetry factor, resolution, number of theoretical plates and peak capacity were used to assess the chromatographic performance of different HPLC systems. The optimal chromatographic system using Agilent ZORBAX SB-C18 column (2.1 mm × 100 mm, 3.5 μm) as stationary phase was respectively coupled with diode array detector or mass spectrometry detector for the chromatographic fingerprint analysis and simultaneous quantification or identification of nine compounds of SGT. All the validation data conformed to the acceptable requirements. For the fingerprint analysis, 31 peaks were selected as the common peaks to evaluate the similarities of SGT from 10 different manufacturers using heatmap, hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis. The results demonstrated that the combinations of the quantitative and chromatographic fingerprint analysis offer an efficient way to evaluate the quality consistency of SGT.