Abstract
A high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method for the simultaneous determination of marker constituents, baicalin and glycyrrhizin was established for the quality control of traditional herbal medicinal preparation, Eul-Ja-Tang (EJT). Separation and quantification were successfully achieved with a Waters XTerra RP18 column ($5{\mu}m$, 4.6 mm I.D. ${\times}$ 150 mm) by gradient elution of a mixture of acetonitrile and water containing 0.03% phosphoric acid (pH 2.03) at a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. The diode-array UV/VIS detector (DAD) was used for the detection and the wavelength for quantification was set at 250 nm. The presence of baicalin and glycyrrhizin in this decoction was ascertained by retention time, spiking with each authentic standard and UV spectrum. Both baicalin and glycyrrhizin showed good linearity ($r^2$ > 0.999) in a relatively wide concentration ranges. The R.S.D. for intra-day and inter-day precision was less than 5% and the limits of detection (LOD) were about 30 ng. The mean recovery of each compound was 99.5 - 101.2% with R.S.D. values less than 4.0%. This method was successfully applied to the determination of contents of baicalin and glycyrrhizin in three commercial products of EJT, which resulted in the difference in the contents of these compounds. These results suggest that the developed HPLC method is simple, effective and could be readily utilized as a quality control method for commercial EJT products.
