Simultaneous determination of psoralen and isopsoralen in plasma and Chinese medicine Xian Ling Gu Bao capsule by using HPLC-DAD coupled with alternating trilinear decomposition algorithm.

A method using high performance liquid chromatography with photodiode-array detection (HPLC-DAD) coupled with alternating trilinear decomposition (ATLD) algorithm was proposed for simultaneous determination of psoralen and isopsoralen in plasma and Chinese medicine "Xian Ling Gu Bao" capsule (XLGBC). In this paper, the application of ATLD algorithm into traditional chromatographic method can handle this problem that the chromatographic and spectral peaks are heavily overlapped among the analytes and even between the analytes and interferences from the background matrices. A simple improvement of chromatographic condition like mobile phase is not enough to realize effective separation for the two isomeric compounds, especially in the presence of interferences. However, the ATLD algorithm utilized "mathematical separation" instead of partial "physical or chemical separation" to directly determine the spectral profiles of the analytes of interests in complex system. The satisfactory quantification results have been gained with simple mobile phase. In the analysis of real Chinese medicine samples, the accuracy of the concentrations which were obtained by ATLD was also validated by HPLC-MS method.