It is ideal and desirable for a single instrument to meet the requirement of both qualitative and quantitative analysis of complicated components in pharmacokinetic research for herbal medicine. Liquid chromatography combined with hybrid ion trap and time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LCMS-IT-TOF) was recently confirmed as a very powerful tool for the qualitative analysis of both target and nontarget components in herbal medicines. The present study was designed to investigate the feasibility of LCMS-IT-TOF on quantitative analysis of ginsenosides in biological matrices. A simple liquid-liquid extraction procedure was followed by injection of the extracts onto a C₁₈ column with gradient elution and detection based on LCMS-IT-TOF system in negative scan mode. The developed method was validated with respect to the limit of quantification, linear dynamic range, precision, accuracy, matrix effects and stabilities. All the results suggested that the presently developed method was sufficiently sensitive and robust enough to simultaneously monitor 15 ginsenosides with diverse properties and a large range of concentration differences. Therefore, this method would be expected to be highly useful for comprehensive studies of ginsenosides in complicated matrix.

The main objective of the current study was to develop a universal method for a protein binding assay of complicated herbal components, and to investigate the possible relationship between compound polarity and protein binding using Schisadra lignans as an example. Firstly, the rat, dog and human plasma were spiked with three different concentrations of Schisandra chinensis extract (SLE), and ultramicrofiltration was used to obtain the unbound ingredients. Secondly, thirty-one Schisandra lignans in total plasma and ultrafiltered fluid were measured by LC-IT-TOFMS. Lastly, a relative exposure approach, which entailed calculating the relative concentrations of each Schisandra lignan from the corresponding calibration equation created from the calibration samples spiked with the stock solution of SLE, was applied in order to overcome the absence of authentic standards. The results showed that Schisandra lignans exhibited a high capability to bind with plasma protein, furthermore, the protein binding ratio of the lignan components increased proportionally with their individual chromatographic retention time, which indicated that the ratio of protein binding of lignans might increase accordingly with decreasing polarity. This study suggested that the compound polarity might be an important factor affecting the plasma protein binding of herbal components.

Concomitant administration of herbal medicines with drugs that are P-glycoprotein (P-gp) substrates may produce significant herb–drug interactions. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of Schisandra lignans extract (SLE) on P-gp thoroughly in vitro and in vivo, and to investigate the possible P-gp-based herb–drug interactions. In the in vitro experiments, the effect of SLE on the uptake and transport for P-gp substrates in Caco-2, LLC-PK1 and L-MDR1 cells were carefully investigated. Verapamil, a known P-gp inhibitor, was used as a positive control drug. Results shown that, 10μM verapamil and SLE (0.5, 2.0, and 10.0μg/ml) were observed to significantly enhance the uptake and inhibit the efflux ratio of P-gp substrates in Caco-2 and L-MDR1 cells. In vivo experiments showed that single-dose SLE at 500mg/kg could increase the area under the plasma concentration time curve of digoxin and vincrisine significantly without affecting terminal elimination half-time. Long-term treatment with SLE for continuous 10 days could also increase the absorption of P-gp substrates with greatly down regulation of P-gp expression in rat intestinal and brain tissues. In conclusion, SLE was a strong P-gp inhibitor, which indicated a potential herb–drug interaction when SLE was co-administered with P-gp substrate drugs.

This study was to systematically investigate the effect of mobile phase additives, including ammonia water, formic acid, acetic acid, ammonium chloride and water (as a control), on qualitative and quantitative analysis of fifteen representative ginsenosides based on liquid chromatography hybrid quadrupole-time of flight mass spectrometry (LC-Q-TOF/MS). To evaluate the influence of mobile phase additives on qualitative performance, the quality of the negative mode MS/MS spectra of ginsenosides produced by online LC-Q-TOF/MS analyses, particularly the numbers and intensities of fragment ions, were compared under different adduct ion states, and found to be strongly affected by the mobile phase additives. When 0.02% acetic acid was added in the mobile phase, the deprotonated ginsenosides ions produced the most abundant product ions, while almost no product ion was observed for the chlorinated ginsenoside ions when 0.1mM ammonium chloride was used as the mobile phase additive. On the other hand, sensitivity, linear range and precision were adopted to investigate the quantitative performance affected by different mobile phase additives. Validation results of the LC-Q-TOF/MS-based quantitative performance for ginsenosides showed that ammonium chloride not only provided the highest sensitivity for all the target analytes, but also dramatically improved the linear ranges, the intra-day and inter-day precisions comparing to the results obtained using other mobile phase additives. Importantly, the validated method, using 0.1mM ammonium chloride as the mobile phase additive, was successfully applied to the quantitative analysis of ginsenosides in rat plasma after intragastric administration of Ginsenoside Extract at 200mg/kg. In conclusion, 0.02% acetic acid was deemed to be the most suitable mobile phase additive for qualitative analysis of ginsenosides, and 0.1mM ammonium chloride in mobile phase could lead to the best quantitative performance. Our results reveal that choosing the appropriate mobile phase additive is an important step in optimizing the analytical conditions, and the best quantitative method may not be suitable for the qualitative analysis.

The qualitative and quantitative capability of the ion trap mass analyzer could be greatly affected by the accumulation time. However, the importance of the accumulation time has not so far been thoroughly explored. Here, the influence of ion accumulation time on qualitative and quantitative analysis of complicated components was systematically investigated based on the case study of 40 ophiopogonins in Ophiopogon extract by hybrid ion trap time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LCMS-IT-TOF). In this process, the accumulation time was set at 10, 25, 50, 100, and 200 ms, respectively. The effect of accumulation time on qualitative analysis of ophiopogonins was studied by comparing the total ion current (TIC) of MS1, TIC of MS2, and the number and signal of fragmental ions. The results demonstrated that the signal could be greatly influenced by varying the accumulation time. The number and signal of the fragmental ions were increased significantly with a longer accumulation time in the range of 10–100 ms. Also, the effect of accumulation time on quantitative analysis of ophiopogonins was investigated by comparing the linearity, accuracy, and precision measured on LCMS-IT-TOF. Importantly, quantitative parameters could all be significantly improved by choosing an appropriate accumulation time.