Analysis of protoberberine alkaloids in several herbal drugs and related medicinal preparations by non-aqueous capillary electrophoresis

Abstract

A simple, rapid, reproducible, and universal non-aqueous capillary electrophoresis method has been developed for the separation and determination of three major active protoberberine alkaloids including berberine, palmatine, and jatrorrhizine within 7 min. The effects of the concentrations of acetic acid and electrolyte, the ratio of organic solvent, and the applied voltage on the separation were investigated. The optimum running buffer was composed of 50 mM ammonium acetate, 0.5% (v/v) acetic acid, and 10% (v/v) acetonitrile in methanol. The applied voltage was 18 kV. The analytes were detected by UV at 214 nm. The linearities between peak areas and the concentrations of the analytes were also investigated, and they exhibit excellent linear behavior over the concentration ranges (correlation coefficients: 0.9975-0.9986). The method was successfully applied to determine the three alkaloids in several families of herbal drugs (Rhizoma Coptidis, Cortex Berberidis, Cortex Phellodendri, Herba Chelidonii, Caulis Mahoniae) and their relevant medicinal preparations for the first time, and the recoveries of the three constituents ranged between 95.6-103.2% for berberine, 97.5-103.3% for palmatine, and 96.1 -103.6% for jatrorrhizine.

Analysis of alkaloids in Coptis chinensis Franch by accelerated solvent extraction combined with ultra performance liquid chromatographic analysis with photodiode array and tandem mass spectrometry detections

“…The respective detection limits of UPLC-PDA and UPLC-MS/MS techniques are in the range of 60-75 and 1.2-1.5 g L −1 for the three alkaloids, which are better than those reported using HPCE-UV. [12]. Both procedures allow the quantitation in the range studied although the quantification range for UPLC-PDA and UPLC-MS/MS were different.…”

“…However, it is our believe that a more effective quality control practice for Huanglian should include the assay of a set of major alkaloids rather than a single species, and it is towards this objective that the present study was initiated. During the last decades, several methods have been reported for the determination of alkaloids in Rhizoma Coptidis extracts, and these methods included colorimetry [9], thin layer chromatography (TLC) [10], capillary electrophoresis [11][12][13], micellar electrokinetic chromatography [14], highperformance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with different detections including mass spectrometry [3,5,[15][16][17][18][19]. The colorimetric method determines only the total alkaloids content but is non-specific towards individual alkaloids.…”

Analysis of major alkaloids in Rhizoma coptidis by capillary electrophoresis‐electrospray‐time of flight mass spectrometry with different background electrolytes

“…The system is incompatible with online MS detection. Gao et al [21] reported that an MS compatible nonaqueous CE could be used to determine protoberberine alkaloids in several herbal drugs. In order to develop a CE-ESI-TOF-MS method for the analysis of alkaloids in R. coptidis, two CE-MS compatible BGEs -one aqueous and one nonaqueous system -were selected for optimization and performance evaluations.…”

“…One publication [21] has reported that methanol and ACN containing ammonium acetate could be used to separate three protoberberine alkaloids in Chinese traditional herbs (R. coptidis, Cortex Berberidis, Cortex Phellodendri, etc.). Thus, in our study, a mixture of MeOH and ACN was chosen as the solvent medium, ammonium acetate was selected as electrolyte, and the nonaqueous BGE was optimized using both three alkaloid standards and real R. coptidis.…”

“…In Fig. 1 tures of the eight alkaloids used in this study are illustrated [6][7][8].During the last decades, many analytical approaches including colorimetry [9], TLC [10], micellar EKC [11], HPLC [6,8,[12][13][14], MS [15,16], CE [17][18][19][20][21], and CE-MS [22] have been developed to assay protoberberine alkaloids in R. coptidis and other herbal medicines. HPLC is a popular method, and different detectors including UV, MS have been used to determine protoberberine alkaloids in R. coptidis extract and its preparation.…”