Determination of coumarins in the roots of Angelica dahurica by supercritical fluid chromatography.

The fact that supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) offers many desirable features is known for a long time. Yet, the number of applications on natural products is still limited, because robust and user-friendly instrumentation became available just a few years ago. As coumarins hardly have been studied by this technique we developed the first SFC assay for their determination in crude plant material. After method optimization eight standard compounds, including simple coumarins, linear and angular furanocoumarins, could be baseline separated in 6min using an Acquity UPC(2) CSH Fluoro-Phenyl 1.7μm column with supercritical CO2, methanol and diethylamine as mobile phase. Method validation confirmed that the assay is linear (R(2)≥0.9995), precise (intra-day variation≤5.8%; inter-day variation≤4.4%) and accurate (recovery rates from 96.5 to 104.2%). Detection limits determined at 300nm were below 2ng on-column, and the method showed to be well suited for the analysis of coumarins in Angelica dahurica roots. It was observed that qualitative as well as quantitative composition vary significantly. In all samples Imperatorin (0.09-0.28%) was the major coumarin, followed either by Isoimperatorin or Oxypeucedanin; the total coumarin content ranged from 0.16 to 0.77%. The results were in good agreement to published data, so that because of its speed and green nature SFC is definitely an interesting alternative for the analysis of this important class of natural products.