Rapid discovery and global characterization of multiple components in corn silk using a multivariate data processing approach based on UHPLC coupled with electrospray ionization/quadrupole time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry

Abstract

Corn silk is an important traditional Chinese medicine which has been widely used as diuretic, antilithiasic, uricosuric, antiseptic, etc. for thousands of years. However, it is a pity that the chemical ingredients in corn silk, especially the constituents absorbed into blood, are unclear up to now. The aim of our study was to investigate the multiple components of corn silk in vitro and in vivo. In this present study, a sensitive and rapid method using ultra high performance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray ionization/quadrupole time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometry and a multivariate data processing approach was established to detect the constituents of corn silk in vitro and in vivo. Consequently, total 41 ingredients in vitro and 19 of them absorbed into blood including luteolin, various C-glycosyl flavones, jasmonic acid, abscisic acid, gibberellin A, etc. were tentatively characterized in sequence. Furthermore, of particular importance, a kind of stable compound named C-glycosyl flavones is a great discovery in vivo, which can point the further pharmacological study target in future. In a word, this is the first serum pharmacochemistry study of corn silk, which played a critical role in exploring the pharmacological and effective data for further research.

The active ingredients analysis of Herba Lysimachiae treating osteoarthritis based on the LC–MS/MS technology and public bioinformatics platforms

“…Information on herbal compounds can be obtained in two ways. One method is directly based on compound analysis techniques [7][8][9], and the other is based on the retrieval from database and literature [1,10,11]. Herbal medicines contain multiple compounds with different polarities.…”

“…Therefore, the herbal compounds in each extract may not be exactly the same as those in databases and literature. Compared with the second method, the results of compound analysis techniques (e.g., LC-MS/MS) may better reflect the true composition of herbal extracts [8,9]. Recently, with the development and use of metabolome data repositories (e.g., METLIN, Human Metabolome Database, and MassBank) and associated data analysis tools (e.g., Progenesis QI software, CAMERA, and SF-Matching) [12,13], the LC-MS/MS technology has been widely employed in the study of chemical compounds of herbal medicines, which is a feasible analytical method for the rapid discovery and global characterization of multiple compounds in herbal medicines [7-9, 14, 15].…”

Rapid analysis and characterization of multiple constituents of corn silk aqueous extract using ultra‐high‐performance liquid chromatography combined with quadrupole time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry

“…Recently, UHPLC‐Q‐TOF‐MS/MS has been widely employed in the study of chemical components and pharmacological actions of TCM, especially for the understanding of bioactive constituents and the related research on mechanisms of action of TCM worldwide. Currently, with the perfect integration of UHPLC‐Q‐TOF‐MS/MS and serum pharmacochemistry methods, the active ingredients migrating into blood from some Chinese herbs have been successfully illuminated, including the alcohol extract of corn silk , the leaves and fruits of Acanthopanax senticosus Harms , Radix Polygalae , prescription AS1350 , and others .…”

A new strategy for analyzing the active ingredients of herbal medicines based on the public bioinformatics platforms

“…At present, there are mainly two ways to obtain the information of herbal compounds. One method is directly based on the compound analysis techniques (Li et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2018a;Wang et al, 2019); the other method is based on the retrieval from the database and literature (Ding et al, 2020;Li et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2017). Herbal medicine contains multiple compounds with different polarities.…”

“…Compared with the retrieval from the database and literature, the results of the compound analysis techniques (eg. LC-MS/MS analysis) may better reflect the true composition of herbal extracts (Liu et al, 2018a;Wang et al, 2019). Previous research has shown that Herba Lysimachiae (HL), the dried entire plant of Lysimachia paridiformis Franch.…”