Abstract
Yinqiaosan is a classic Chinese herbal medicine formula that has been
used to treat various bacterial and viral infections by Chinese medicine doctors
for over two centuries. In this work, we developed a comprehensive qualitative
and quantitative method for identification, quantitation, and quality assessment
of chemical constituents of Yinqiaosan formula in four different preparation
forms (i.e., decoction, granule, pill, and tablet), which employed
ultra-performance liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass
spectrometry with a single exogenous reference internal standard for untargeted
metabolomics profiling and global semiquantitative analysis. The use of a single
exogenous reference internal standard permitted not only qualitative and
quantitative analyses of multiple herbal components in a single instrument run,
but also cross-comparison of chemical contents in between all four Yinqiaosan
preparation forms. The acquired mass chromatograms were analyzed, quantitated,
and compared using multivariate data analysis for similarities and differences
of chemical constituents in four Yinqiaosan preparation forms. For the first
time, we were able to identify over 100 chemical constituents from each
preparation form using the available database. Among the 49 commonly identified
compounds in the 4 Yinqiaosan preparation forms, 16 have been reported to have
pharmacological activities, which may be used in a network pharmacology study of
Yinqiaosan for exploring the underlying mechanism of the herbal formula.
Key words Yinqiaosan - Chinese herbal medicine formula - untargeted metabolomics profiling - global semiquantitative analysis - multivariate data analysis - UPLC-QTOF-MS
