Quantitative and Fingerprint Analyses of Chinese Sweet Tea Plant (Rubus suavissimus S. Lee)

Abstract

Quality of botanical food is increasingly assessed by the content of multiple bioactive compounds. In this study we report, for the first time, an HPLC fingerprinting method for the quality evaluation of Rubus suavissimus leaves possessing multiple bioactivities. Five constituents, gallic acid, rutin, ellagic acid, rubusoside, and steviol monoside were quantified and used in developing qualitative chromatographic fingerprints. The limits of detection and quantification ranged from 0.29 μg/mL to 37.86 μg/mL. The relative standard deviations (RSDs) of intra-and inter-day precisions were no more than 3.14% and 3.01%, respectively. The average recoveries were between 93.1% and 97.5%. The developed method was validated in analyzing fourteen leaf samples with satisfactory results. The contents of the five marker compounds accounted for an average of about 6% w/w with a variability of 16% among the fourteen samples collected from a single site and year. Gallic acid was the least whereas steviol monoside the most variable compounds among the fourteen leaf samples. The characteristic compound rubusoside that is responsible for the sweet taste accounted for 5% of leaf weight. The validated method can now be used to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the quality of Rubus suavissimus leaves as traditional beverage or potential medicines.

Development and validation of a HPLC method for the quantification of three flavonoids in a crude extract of Dimorphandra gardneriana

“…The optimization of the chromatographic conditions led to a good resolution of adjacent peaks of the flavonoids in this study when compared to other methods previously described for the quantification of these compounds in crude plant materials (Chou et al, 2009;Batista et al, 2010).…”

Chromatographic separation techniques and data handling methods for herbal fingerprints: A review

“…The similarity ranges between 0 and 1, with 0 meaning no similarity between the fingerprints and 1 identical fingerprints. Besides similarity analysis based on the entire fingerprint [39,45,87,92,102,116,117,122], the relative retention time (RTT) and relative peak area (RPA) of characteristic peaks can also be used [197]. Over the years, new methodologies for similarity analysis of fingerprints have been developed.…”

Simultaneous determination of flavonoids and triterpenoids in <i>Cyclocarya paliurus</i> leaves using high-performance liquid chromatography

“…Seasonal variations in natural compounds are fairly common and can contribute to variations of the finished products (Chou et al, 2009). Black et al (2011 reported that there were significant seasonal variations in fifteen constituents of Northern Labrador Tea (Rhododendron tomentosum ssp.…”

“…In this study, the content of isoquercitrin was 0.23 mg/g in HHF provenance, and it was much lower than the report from Fang et al (2011), likely caused by seedling ages and extraction methods. Therefore, JXS is selected to be the optimal provenance based on the quantification of seven bioactive compounds.Seasonal variations in natural compounds are fairly common and can contribute to variations of the finished products (Chou et al, 2009). Black et al (2011 reported that there were significant seasonal variations in fifteen constituents of Northern Labrador Tea (Rhododendron tomentosum ssp.…”