Comparison of Extracts from Dry and Alcohol-Steamed Root of Polygonatum kingianum (Huang Jing) by Sub-2-μm-LC-TOF-MS.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) uses naturally occurring resources such as plants and animals to treat diseases. Most TCM-derived plants must be processed prior to their medicinal usage; hence the effective ingredients may differ from those in the freshly harvested plant extracts. In this work, we present a fast and generic approach using sub-2-pm liquid chromatography-time-of-flight-mass spectrometry (sub-2-pm-LC-TOF-MS) coupled with multivariate statistical data analysis to systematically profile the ingredient changes between the fresh and processed samples. We believe this approach will ultimately facilitate the progress of migrating from a TCM system to a modern Chinese medicine (MCM) system. The application example described here studies different extracts from Polygonatum kingianum, a plant otherwise known in China as huang jing. For this study, we exam- ined the differences in ingredient composition of huang jing before and after processing so that the leading chemical markers could be profiled and identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]