Abstract
A high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with DAD detector and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) was established for the simultaneous determination of coniferin (1), loganic acid (2), demethylsecologanol (3), sweroside (4) and loganin (5) from caulis Lonicera joponica. The optimal chromatographic conditions were obtained on an ODS column ($5{\mu}m$, $4.6{\times}150mm$) with the column temperature $35^{\circ}C$. The mobile phase was composed of (A) water with 0.1% formic acid and (B) methanol with 0.1% formic acid using a gradient elution, the flow rate was 0.3 ml/min. Detection wavelength was set at 254 nm. All calibration curves showed good linear regression ($r^2$>0.998) within test ranges. The developed method provided satisfactory precision and accuracy with overall intra-day and interday variations of 0.16~3.28% and 0.14~1.99%, respectively, and the overall recoveries of 99.39~105.89% for the five compounds analyzed. The verified method was successfully applied to quantitative determination of the two types (phenolic compounds and iridoids) of bioactive compounds in 24 commercial caulis L. japonica samples from different markets in Korea and China. The analytical results demonstrated that the contents of the five analytes vary significantly with sources.