Qualitative and quantitative determination of 15 main active constituents in Fructus Sophorae pill by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

Background: Fructus Sophorae pill, one of the traditional Chinese medicine, was widely used for hemorrhoids, hypertension and odontalgia. This paper describes a sensitive and specific assay for the determination of the 15 active constituents (sophoricoside, genistin, genistein, rutin, quercetin, kaempferol, baicalein, baicalin, naringin, naringenin, hesperidin, neohesperidin, wogonin and cimifugin, prim‑O‑glucosylcimifugin) in Fructus Sophorae pill. Materials and Methods: Chromatographic separation was performed on a C18 column with acidified aqueous methanol gradients at a flow rate of 0.8 mL/min. The identification and quantification of the analytes were achieved by use of a hybrid quadrupole linear ion trap mass spectrometer. Multiple‑reaction monitoring scanning was applied to quantification with switching electrospray ion source polarity between positive and negative modes. Results: The proposed method was used to analyze 40 batches of samples with good linearity (r, 0.9990-0.9999), intraday precisions (RSD, 0.14-2.55%), interday precisions (RSD, 0.51-2.81%), stability (RSD, 0.31-2.65%), and recovery (RSD, 1.29-2.95%) of the 15 compounds. In addition, the hierarchical cluster analysis, including a method called furthest neighbor and nearest neighbor, was employed to classify samples according to characteristics of the 15 constituents. Conclusion: The results indicated that the analytical method was rapid, reliable, simple and suitable for the quality evaluation of Fructus Sophorae pill.