Licorice is the most frequently used herb in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) with versatile functions. It is also a popular natural dietary supplement. While the dosages is very important for there are some side effects caused by licorice. The composition of licorice, its products should be well determined thereof. A simple method for simultaneous determining sixteen compounds in vary high dynamic range of content has been established. This method based on the detection at the characteristic ultraviolet spectra of different types of compounds in licorice. Glycyrrhizin and fifteen flavonoids were well measured. All of these compounds can be precisely quantified at their characteristic wavelengths. This method has been successfully applied to the analyses of different licorices, Sini Tang decoction, and rat plasma after oral administration of Sini Tang decoction. These compounds were found to be over 3000 times in content (from 0.01？ g/g to 34.5？ g/g) in some samples. 1. Introduction It is well known that herbal prescription is becoming increasingly popular as supplementary and alternative medicine in recent years. The herbal medicines are believed to be multitarget therapies in modern medicine [1–4]. Herbal drugs usually consist of a large number of ingredients [5]. These ingredients might interact with each other during the process of decoction, absorption, metabolism, or at physiological processes [6–9]. Multiconstituent detection is very important to uncover these interactions during the process of the herb application. It is also important to summarize the common behavior of some constituents with similar structure during some bioprocesses, which is a crucial method to unveil the bioactive mechanism of a herbal drug [10]. However, there are two kinds of obstacles that should be succeeded for multiple compounds detection. The first is the large number of compounds in the herb. The second is the high dynamic range of their contents. High resolution and peak capacity are needed to resolve the overlaid signals of these compounds. In order to estimate the different concentrations of them, detector with very long-range linearity and good selectivity of the detector response should be employed. Licorice is an important herb in oriental medicine. It is widely used to treat gastric ulcer, hepatitis C and pulmonary and skin diseases [11–15]. Licorice is also a popular natural dietary supplement [16]. According to a statistic investigation [17] on Chinese herbal prescription, licorice is the most frequently used herb in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). It
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