The stem bark of Magnolia obovata (M. obovata) or Magnolia officinalis (M. officinalis) has been used in traditional Japanese herbal medicine, called Magnolia Bark in the Japanese Pharmacopoeia, for the treatment of thrombotic stroke, typhoid fever, fever, and headaches.1) It has been reported that Magnolia Bark suppresses mitogen-induced proliferation of human peripheral blood lymphocytes 2) and has central depressant effects.3) Honokiol and magnolol (structures shown in Fig. 1), isomers of neolignans, have been isolated from the bark of this plant and other Magnoliaceae.
4)These compounds have been found to exhibit muscle relaxant activity, 5) to inhibit intracellular calcium mobilization in platelets caused by collagen, even in the presence of indomethacin, 6) to relax vascular smooth muscles by releasing an endothelium-derived relaxing factor and to inhibit calcium influx through voltage-gated calcium channels, 7) and to have antihemostatic and antithrombotic effects.8) Recent studies indicate that honokiol has an antagonistic effect on calmodulin 9) and magnolol has anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects.10) In addition, honokiol has been reported to induce calcium mobilization, and to show neurotrophic activity in rat cortical neurons. 11,12) Thus the quality control of Magnolia Bark by determining honokiol and magnolol is important for pharmaceutical companies in the production of traditional Japanese herbal medicines. According to the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, the branch bark, root bark, flower buds, as well as the stem bark of M. officinalis var. biloba are also used for medicinal purposes. The distribution of honokiol and magnolol is significant for harvest of these crude herbal medicines in the optimal season, and/or for the selection of trees.Several methods that have been reported for the determination of honokiol or magnolol are: ion-pair high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), 13) HPLC with UV detection (HPLC-UV), [14][15][16][17][18][19] and capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE).20) However, these methods lack the sensitivity and selectivity required for determining contents of honokiol and magnolol in a small part of a sample tree. Electrochemical detection (ECD) is respected for its high sensitivity and selective determination of honokiol and magnolol, because it is both selective and sensitive for redox compounds such as phenolic compounds. Yet, no paper has been published on the determination of honokiol and magnolol by HPLC with ECD (HPLC-ECD).In our previous reports, we successfully developed a more than 30 fold sensitive HPLC-ECD method for determining catechins 21) and quercetin 22) in human plasma, and orthophenylphenol in lemon rind 23) using a microbore octadecylsilica (ODS) column, when compared to a reported HPLC-ECD method that used a conventional ODS column. [21][22][23] So, the present HPLC-ECD method using a microbore column (mHPLC-ECD) was expected to be an even more highly sensitive method. In the present study, we developed a mHPLC-ECD method for determining honokiol and m...