Chromatographic fingerprinting technique is a useful and facile tool for the quality evaluation of herbal medicine and their related products. This technique has been introduced and accepted by WHO as a strategy for the quality assessment of herbal medicines in early 1990s.1) Among those commonly used methods, HPLC-DAD-MS technique has been used widely for the simultaneous qualitative and quantitative analysis of herbal medicine and their related products, with on-line UV and mass spectrometric information available for each individual peak in the chromatogram. In this regard, HPLC-DAD-MS fingerprint analysis has recently been considered as a more comprehensive and powerful technique for establishment of chromatographic fingerprinting.
2-4)Fresh Houttuynia cordata THUNB. has been a well known traditional Chinese medicinal material widely used in China, Japan and also listed in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2005 edition).5) It possesses a variety of pharmacological activities including anti-platelet aggregation, antibacterial, antitumor, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antileukemic, immunomodulatory and recently, demonstrated its efficacy in anti-SARS. [6][7][8][9][10] In general, the chemical components of H. cordata comprised of three major types, namely: essential oil, phenols and alkaloid components.11) However, most of the previous related studies were mainly focused on the chemistry of essential oil, which has been considered responsible for the claimed clinical efficacy.12) Recent pharmacological studies also revealed that the flavonoid components in H. cordata possess antineoplastic, antioxidant, antimutagenic and free radical scavenging capacity. [13][14][15] Similarly, the alkaloid components demonstrated significant potent antiplatelet and cytotoxic activities, 7,16) whereas chlorogenic acid had significant antipyretic and antibiotic properties.17) Although a variety of pharmacological activities associated with these groups of chemical in H. cordata was demonstrated, the common used quality standard of H. cordata is still relied merely on the content of undecanone which served as a marker compound for the quality evaluation standard as stipulated in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2005 edition).
5)This phenomenon stimulated our thought to develop a chromatographic fingerprinting technique to associate various pharmacological activities with the chemical profile and thus the quality of H. cordata and its related products. Moreover, as the crude herbs are generally cultivated for use over China, a vast variety of external factors can therefore affect the chemical composition, and thus the pharmacological activity of that particular herbal medicine. These factors include geographical origin for cultivation, drying methods used, different medicinal portions, etc. [18][19] In this regard, a facile and comprehensive means for evaluating the overall quality of H. cordata is urgently needed.In literature, related analyses on H. cordata species are particularly focused on TLC, GC, GC-MS and a few of them on HPLC. [2...