A metabolomic strategy to screen the prototype components and metabolites of Qingkailing injection in rat urine by high-performance liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry.

Xenobiotic metabolome identification of Chinese herbal formula in biological systems is a very challenging task. Qingkailing injection is a typical Chinese herbal injection, which is wildly used clinically in China. However, the holistic metabolic fate of the ingredient from Qingkailing injection remains unclear. In this work, a metabolomic strategy for comprehensively elucidating Qingkailing injection derived prototype components and metabolites in rat urine conducted by hybrid linear ion trap high-resolution mass spectrometry was developed. High-performance liquid chromatography coupled with hybrid linear ion trap high-resolution mass spectrometry was developed to obtain the urine profiling between the control group and Qingkailing injection treated group. Orthogonal partial least squares discriminate analysis was applied to distinguish the exogenous and the endogenous. In the S-plot, 37 xenobiotics derived from Qingkailing injection were found in urine, including 18 prototype compounds and 19 metabolites. The characterization of the prototype components and metabolites in rat's urine provided essential data for further pharmacological studies of Qingkailing injection. Our results indicated that the metabolomic approach was an effective tool to discover, screen, and analyze the multiple prototype components and their metabolites from complicated traditional Chinese preparations in vivo.