Rapid and Sensitive High-performance Liquid Chromatography/tandem Mass Spectrometry Method For Determination of Danshensu in Rat Plasma - Rapid and Sensitive High-performance Liquid Chromatography/tandem Mass Spectrometry Method For Determination of Danshensu in Rat Plasma - Open Access Pub

A sensitive, specific and rapid high-performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (hplc–ms/ms) method has been developed and validated for the determination of danshensu (dss) in rat plasma in the present study. The analytes were separated on a c18 column (50 mm×2.1 mm, 1.7 μm) and a triplequadrupole mass spectrometry equipped with electrospray ionization (esi) source was applied for detection. The simple protein precipitation was applied to extract dss from the plasma (about 80%). The method was linear over the concentration ranges of 50–1000 ng/ml for dss. The lower limit of quantitation (lloq) of dss was 50 ng/ml. The intra-day and inter-day relative standard deviation (rsd) were less than 15% and the relative error (re) were all within 15%. Finally, the method was successfully applied to support the pharmacokinetic study after guanxinsu solution was orally administrated to the sprague–dawley rat, respectively. DOI 10.14302/issn.2326-0793.jpgr-13-291 Radix Salviae Miltiorrhizae (Danshen in Chinese) is one of the most popular herbs used in many traditional Chinese medicines that have been commonly applied for promoting blood circulation to remove blood stasis, relieving vexation, nourishing the blood and cooling the blood to relieve carbuncles.1, 2, 3Danshensu extracts contains both hydrophilic components (danshensu (DSS), protocatechuicaldehyde and salvianolic acid B, etc.) and lipophilic components (tanshinone I, tanshinone IIA and cryptotanshinone, etc). It was reported that plasma and urinary DSS are promising pharmacokinetic (PK) marker for some traditional Chinese medicines containing DSS.4 Therefore, it is important to determine DSS in the biological samples in order to evaluate the quality of the danshen-contained medicines. Some reversed-phase HPLC and TLC methods have been developed for the determination of DSS.5, 6Recently, Some analysis method based on liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS, LC–MS/MS, LC-ion trap MS) were also described for determining DSS in human plasma.7 In the present study, we present a fast, sensitive and selective method for measuring DSS in plasma using ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC–MS/MS) based on the previous work. The LLOQ of 50 ng/mL in plasma corresponded to an on-column sensitivity (the quantity of drug injected on the column per injection) of 125 pg DSS, which was low enough to support the PK study of DSS. The sample was prepared with the simple protein precipitation method. The present method was validated and