BackgroundCuscuta species known as dodder, have been used in traditional medicine of eastern and southern Asian countries as liver and kidney tonic. Flavonoids are considered as the main biologically active constituents in Cuscuta plants especially in C. chinensis Lam.ObjectiveIn the present study, a fast, simple and reliable method for the simultaneous determination and quantization of C. chinensis flavonols including hyperoside, rutin, isorhamnetin and kaempferol has been developed.Materials and methodsThe chromatographic separation was carried out on a reversed phase ACE 5 C18 with eluting at a flow rate of 1 ml/min using a gradient with O-phosphoric acid 0.25% : acetonitrile for 42 min. UV spectra were collected across the range of 200–900 nm, extracting 360 nm for the chromatograms. The method was validated according to linearity, selectivity, precision, recovery, LOD and LOQ.ResultsThe method was selective for determination of rutin, hyperoside, isorhamnetin and kampferol. The calibration graphs of flavonols were linear with r2 > 0.999. RSDs% of intra- and inter-day precisions were found 1.3&3.4 for rutin, 1.5&2.8 for hyperoside, 1.3&3.3 for isorhamnetin and 1.7 & 2.9 for kaempferol which were satisfactory. LODs and LOQs were calculated as 1.73 & 8.19 for rutin, 0.09 & 4.19 for hyperoside, 2.09 & 6.3 for isorhamnetin and 0.18 & 0.56 for kaempferol. The recovery averages of above-mentioned flavonols were 90.3%, 97.4%, 98.7% and 90.0%, respectively.ConclusionThe simplicity of the method makes it highly valuable for quality control of C. chinensis according to quantization of flavonols.

Background: Cuscuta spp. known as dodders, have been used as traditional medicines in eastern and southern Asian countries for many disorders such as gastrointestinal, respiratory, endocrine, skin and neurological diseases (Drug of mania). Flavonoids are the main biologically active constituents in Cuscuta genus especially in C. chinensis. Our aim in this study was to identify and discriminate between C. chinensis samples which were collected from different hosts, by using the pattern recognition aided fingerprint analysis and comparison of the content of four major flavonoids (hyperoside, rutin, isorhamnetin, kaempferol). Material and methods: Samples were collected from nine different plants in the same time and place, dried, grinded and extracted with methanol (80%) by repeated maceration. Extractions were evaluated by high performance liquid chromatography analysis and fingerprinting. Results: Beside chromatographic fingerprint using similarity index, we compared the content of 4 major flavonoids (hyperoside, rutin, isorhamnetin, kaempferol) of C. chinensis samples on different hosts. Coclusion: The results showed that there were significant differences between the content of four major flavonoids of nine C. chinensis samples, but chromatographic fingerprint by similarity index of more than 0.88, showed that the sample consistency was similar. So, it was suggested that combination of chromatographic fingerprint and the content determination of major flavonoids could be used to evaluate the quality control of C. chinensis from different hosts.

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