Abstract:

Astragalus polysaccharides (APS) are important components in Astragalus membranaceus (A. membranaceus). However, for the huge relative molecular mass, strong polarity, and difficulty in chromatographic separation, there's a lack of quality control finely reflecting the composition of APS up to now. To solve the problems, the key lies in degradation of polysaccharides and analysis of the hydrolyzates. A partial acid hydrolysis-hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) fingerprint for APS and a comprehensive quality evaluation method for A. membranaceus combining with the traditional RPLC fingerprint were developed. Orthogonal experiments were designed to investigate the influencing factors of partial hydrolysis and the conditions were optimized based on HILIC analysis. The hydrolyzates were successfully separated using HILIC-evaporative light scattering detection (ELSD) method and the optimal conditions of hydrolysis were selected as 80℃, 1.5 mol/L trifluoroacetic acid and 4 h, which proved to be stable and repeatable after the validation. This method was applied for the fingerprint analysis of 20 batches of A. membranaceus. Cosine method was used for similarity calculation using the average of samples Nos. 1-10 as reference. Moreover, RPLC fingerprint analysis was processed on other components and the data were compared for comprehensive evaluation. The similarities of ten samples with the reference ranged from 0.258 to 0.949, which were consistent with the chromatograms reflecting the apparent disparity in APS, and could be as a supplement of the RPLC fingerprint. The new method, with the advantages of intuition, convenience, and quantifiable in similarity, could reflect the differences of the composition of polysaccharides after degradation and was successfully applied in profiling of APS, contributing to the quality control together with the RPLC fingerprint.

Key words: Astragalus polysaccharides (APS), fingerprint, hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC), partial acid hydrolysis, quality evaluation