Chinese Journal of Chromatography ›› 2013, Vol. 31 ›› Issue (1): 79-82.DOI: 10.3724/SP.J.1123.2012.08038

• Technical Notes • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Determination of Huperzine A in the extract of Huperzia serrata by high performance liquid chromatography

ZHANG Jingcai1, WEI Jie2, ZHONG Hongmin1, GUO Zhimou2*, ZHANG Hua1*   

  1. 1. College of Chemistry, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116023, China; 2. Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian 116023, China
  • Received:2012-08-23 Revised:2012-09-26 Online:2013-01-28 Published:2013-01-21

Abstract: A high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method was established to determine the Huperzine A in the extract of Huperzia serrata. After extracted by methanol/water/formic acid (10/90/0.2, v/v/v), the sample was filtered for HPLC analysis. The separation was performed on an XCharge C18 column (150 mm×4.6 mm, 5 μm) by gradient elution with water (containing 0.1% (v/v) trifluoroacetic acid) and acetonitrile (containing 0.09%(v/v) trifluoroacetic acid) as the mobile phases. Rapid separation was achieved within 10 min at a flow rate of 2 mL/min with ultraviolet absorption detection at a wavelength of 310 nm. Under the optimized conditions, good linearity was obtained in the range of 2.12-106 mg/L with the correlation coefficient (R2) of about 0.9999. The average recovery was 102.34% with the relative standard deviation (RSD) of 0.46%. The intraday and interday precisions were all below 2%. The results demonstrate that this method is simple, rapid and accurate with good reproducibility, and can be used to evaluate the quality of Huperzia serrata.

Key words: alkaloid, Chinese medicinal herb, Huperzia serrata, Huperzine A, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)