Direct Flavonoid-Focused Chemical Comparison among Three Epimedium Plants by Online Liquid Extraction–High Performance Liquid Chromatography–Tandem Mass Spectrometry

摘要: It is usually a tedious task to profile the chemical composition of given herbal medicine (HM) using high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) due time-consuming sample preparation and laborious post-acquisition data processing procedures. Even worse, some labile compounds may face degradation risks when exposed organic solvents for relatively long period. As one most popular HMs, promising therapeutic benefits Epimedii Herba (Chinese name: Yinyanghuo) are well defined; however, profile, in particular those flavonoids that have been claimed be responsible efficacy, remains largely unknown. Attempts devoted here achieve direct LC-MS measurement efficient processing, chemome comparison among three original sources Herba, such as Epimedium sagittatum (Esa), E. pubescens (Epu), koreanum (Eko) was employed illustrate strategy utility. A home-made online extraction (OLE) module introduced at front analytical column comprehensively transfer from raw materials onto instrument. defect filtering approach programmed efficiently mine massive dataset after which miniature database built involving all information genus draw pentagonal frame rapidly capture potential quasi-molecular ions (mainly [M-H]-). total 99 (66 Esa, 84 Eko, 66 Epu) were captured, structurally annotated by summarizing fragmentation pathways spectrometric authentic an in-house library well. Noteworthily, neutral loss 144 Da firstly assigned cleavage rhamnosyl residues. Significant species-differences didn't occur their patterns. The current study proposed robust enabling rapid profiling of, but not limited to, HMs.