Screening of bioactive components from traditional Chinese medicines using cell membrane chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry.

INTRODUCTION: Cell membrane chromatography (CMC), as a highly selective type of affinity chromatography, has been demonstrated as an effective method to screen bioactive components acting on specific receptor from a complicated biological system. OBJECTIVE: To review the recent research progress and the technical applications of these analytical methods using CMC combined with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, (GC/MS) and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS). METHODOLOGY: In this review, we briefly introduce the CMC offline GC/MS, CMC online GC/MS, CMC offline LC/MS, and CMC online LC/MS system. And the practical application of these technologies is also enumerated. Then the future of these technologies and research methods were discussed. RESULTS: Many bioactive components interacting with specific receptors have been screened and identified in traditional Chinese medicines. CONCLUSION: CMC technique has been combined with GC/MS and HPLC/MS and these combined systems have been successfully used to screen bioactive components acting on specific receptors from a complicated biological system.

[A consideration on screening of allelochemicals by using "knock-out/in" of targeting ingredients based on identification model of medicinal effect].

This paper clarified in detail the definition, characteristics of allelopathy and its association with consecutive monoculture problem.Most of studies have indicated that it is critical to parse the formation mechanisms of consecutive monoculture problem that identification of allelochemicals and verification of its function. Here, we proposed a new approach to separate and identify the allelochemical group precisely and effectively, in which the "knock-out/in" methods of targeting ingredients in the model of medicinal effect identification and quality control were applied. This method will contribute to deep understanding plant allelopathy, and provide theoretical basis and technical support for alleviating consecutive monoculture problems simultaneously.

Fast determination of four active compounds in Sanqi Panax Notoginseng Injection samples by high-performance liquid chromatography with a chemometric method.

The application of chemometric methods could decrease the requirements of separation and simplify time-consuming pretreatment and experimental optimization. In this report, the accumulated projection method was developed and utilized for the rapid simultaneous quantification of four active components (notoginsenoside R1, ginsenosides Rg1, ginsenosides Re, and ginsenosides Rb1) in Sanqi Panax Notoginseng Injection samples. The proposed method is based on the three-dimensional fingerprint spectra obtained from high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with photodiode array detection. Although the chromatograms consisted of overlapping peaks, retention time shifts, and unknown interference, all established models showed good linearity (R > 0.9869) within test ranges. The relative standard deviation for intra- and interday precision of the four compounds did not exceed 2.4 and 4.7%, respectively, and the overall recovery was 91.2-106.8%. Compared with N-way principal component analysis, our method provides more satisfactory results, which indicate that the proposed approach is simple, fast, and reliable for the determination of the four analytes in Sanqi Panax Notoginseng Injection samples.

A practical application of wavelet moment method on the quantitative analysis of Shuanghuanglian oral liquid based on three-dimensional fingerprint spectra.

The overlapping and shifts of peaks and noise signals appear mostly in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) experiments. A practical application of wavelet moment method on the quantitative analysis of the main active components in Shuanghuanglian oral liquid samples was presented based on the determination of HPLC coupled with photodiode array detector (PAD). The wavelet moments were calculated from the divided regions in the grayscale images of three-dimensional (3D) HPLC-PAD fingerprint spectra according to the target peak(s), and then used to establish linear models, respectively. The correlation coefficients (R) were more than 0.9980 within the test ranges. The intra- and inter-day variations were less than 1.13% and 1.10%, respectively. The recovery ranged from 96.2% to 102.7%. The overall LODs and LOQs were less than 0.2 µg/mL and 0.7 µg/mL, respectively. Our study indicated that wavelet moment approach could defuse the overlapping and shifts of peaks and noise signals in the chromatographic determination owing to its multi-resolution and inherently invariance properties. Thus the analytical time was shortened, and the obtained results were reliable and accurate.