Abstract
In this study, a fingerprint-activity relationship between chemical fingerprints and hepatoprotective activity was established to evaluate the quality of salt-treated Apocyni Veneti Folium (AVF). Characteristic fingerprints of AVF samples exposed to different concentrations of salt were generated by ultrafast liquid chromatography tandem triple time-of-flight mass/mass spectrometry (UFLC-Triple TOF-MS/MS), and a similarity analysis was performed based on common characteristic peaks by hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA). Then, the hepatoprotective activity of AVF against CCl4-induced acute liver damage in mice was investigated by assessing biochemical markers and histopathology, which showed that a high dose of AVF exposed to low levels of salt stress produced a marked amelioration of hepatic damage compared with the other salt-treated AVF. Finally, fingerprint-activity relationship modeling, which was capable of discovering the bioactive markers used in the quality evaluation, was investigated by the chemical fingerprints and the hepatoprotective activities utilizing multivariate statistical analysis, gray correlation analysis (GCA) and bivariate correlation analysis (BCA). The results showed that the accumulation of polyphenols, such as flavonoids and phenolic acids, in AVF subjected to low levels of salt stress could result in the effective scavenging of free radicals. Therefore, the present study may provide a powerful strategy to holistically evaluate the quality of salt-treated AVF in combination with chemical fingerprint and bioactivity evaluation.
Highlights
In this study, a fingerprint-activity relationship between chemical fingerprints and hepatoprotective activity was established to evaluate the quality of salt-treated Apocyni Veneti Folium (AVF)
In this study, fingerprint-activity relationship modeling by ultrafast liquid chromatography (UFLC)-Triple TOF-MS/MS analysis was performed to assess the quality of AVF exposed to different concentrations of salt and discover bioactive markers associated with efficacy of the AVF in vivo
The representative base peak chromatograms obtained from the analysis under the positive and negative ion modes of UFLC-Triple TOF-MS/MS for the reference mixture and AVF were obtained under the optimal conditions (Fig. S1)
Summary
A fingerprint-activity relationship between chemical fingerprints and hepatoprotective activity was established to evaluate the quality of salt-treated Apocyni Veneti Folium (AVF). Several chromatographic techniques, including liquid chromatography (LC)[11], gas chromatography (GC)[12], thin-layer chromatography (TLC)[13], and high-performance capillary electrophoresis (HPCE)[14], have been used to construct chemical fingerprints of AVF, which has allowed researchers to visualize and identify as many components of the plant as possible. A high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) system is typically employed to establish the chemical fingerprints and quality assessment of AVF because of its ease of operation, high selectivity, and accuracy[9,11,15] Limits of this HPLC system include the identification of unknown components. References have shown that AVF has protective effects against CCl4-induced acute liver injury due to its antioxidative, anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory constituents[6]
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