Rapid Quantification of Chinese Medicine Zuo Jin Pill via RRLC

A rapid method based on rapid resolution liquid chromatography(RREC) coupled with a diode array detector(DAD) was developed for the simultaneous determination of six major constituents(magnoflorine, jatrorrhizine, coptisine, palmatine, berberine and evodiamine) in traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) Zuo Jin Pill(ZJP). The satisfactory chromatographic separation was carried on an Eclipse Plus C-18 column(1.8 mu m id., 150 mmx4.6 mm) by linear gradient elution with a mobile phase of acetonitrile-acetate buffer. All the calibration curves show good linearity (r(2)>0.9998). The detection limits and quantification limits ranged in 1.4-12 ng and 4.8-30 ng, respectively. The intra- and inter-day precisions were less than 0.63% with accuracies 98.60%-100.78%, and the recoveries were from 99.45% to 100.46%. Furthermore, hierarchical cluster analysis(HCA) was used to evaluate the variation of the herbal prescription. The results demonstrate that this analytical method is simple, sensitive and reliable for rapidly analyzing six major bioactive compounds in ZJPs and is helpful to comprehensively evaluating the quality of this TCM.