Unified strategy for HPLC-MS evaluation of bioactive compounds for quality control of herbal products

Evaluation of safety, quality and composition of herbal products and food supplements based on botanical ingredients is a matter of serious concern. For screening of botanicals in herbal products multitargeted and group-targeted approaches may be applied. In the group-targeted approach botanicals are characterized by means of an appropriate group of structurally related biomarkers compared with the multitargeted approach where a number of selected analytes are monitored based on a multiple reaction monitoring survey. In this study a unified strategy for quality control of herbal products was developed on the basis of fast ultrasound-assisted extraction, chromatographic separation and mass spectrometric quantification of bioactive compounds. A large list of unique biomarkers were monitored under almost identical chromatographic conditions, while an efficient strategy for HPLC-MS group-targeted analysis was also developed for comprehensive evaluation of chemical composition of botanicals intensively used for herbal product manufacturing. In the latter case, structurally close compounds were determined in a single ion monitoring mode for the characteristic group of fragment ions, allowing fast profiling and quality assessment of the plant material or complex food supplement. The sensitivity of the developed approaches was on the level of 1-50 ng/mL, which is higher than that of existing HPLC-UV quality control methods.