Chemical fingerprint analysis of Fritillaria delavayi Franch. by high-performance liquid chromatography.

Bulbus of Fritillaria delavayi Franch. is the most commonly used antitussive and apophlegmatic in China and commonly prepared by water decoction. In this study, a novel and reliable method of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was developed both for quantitative analysis of 10 bioactive compounds (uracil, cytidine, inosine, uridine, guanosine, thymidine, adenosine, hypoxanthine, adenine and 2-deoxyadenosine) and chemical fingerprint analysis of F. delavayi Franch. In quantitative analysis, 10 compounds showed good regressions (R(2) > 0.9982) within test ranges and the recovery of the method was in the range of 96.33-104.51%. In the fingerprint analysis, 11 characteristic peaks were selected to evaluate the similarities of F. delavayi Franch. samples, and the HPLC chromatograms of 16 samples from different regions of China showed similar patterns. The results from the experiment demonstrated that the combinations of the quantitative and chromatographic fingerprint analysis offer an efficient way to evaluate the quality consistency of F. delavayi Franch.