Identification and Quantification Analysis on the Chemical Constituents from Traditional Mongolian Medicine Flos Scabiosae Using UHPLC-DAD-Q-TOF-MS Combined with UHPLC-QqQ-MS.

In this study, a systematic method was established for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the major constituents in Flos Scabiosae (FS). First, Ultra-high performance liquid chromatography tandem quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS) was developed for the identification of the multi-constituents in FS. A total of 48 compounds (9 phenolic acids, 24 flavonoids, 8 iridoids and 7 others) were unambiguously or tentatively identified, including 25 compounds (flavonoids, phenolic acids) identified in FS for the first time. Second, ultra-high performance liquid chromatography combined with triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS-MS) was developed for the quantitative analysis of 10 phenolic compounds. Ten compounds, either with high contents or strong bioactivities, were chosen as markers. This analytical method was validated through intra- and inter-day precision, repeatability and stability, with respective relative standard deviations <4.43, <8.64, <4.60 and <3.65%, respectively. The limits of detection and quantification were <1.09 and <16.96 ng/mL, respectively. The overall recoveries ranged from 96.47 to 103.94% .Then the validated method was applied to determine 10 batches of FS. The results indicated that the new method can be applied for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of FS.