Abstract
Mulberry leaves have commonly been utilized in China as a herbal medicine for the treatment of diabetes for thousands of years. To evaluate the quality, an ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with quadrupole time of flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-Q-TOF/MS) method was developed for identification of polyhydroxylated alkaloids with α-glucosidase inhibitor activity in mulberry leaf. As a result, five alkaloid compounds were identified or tentatively characterized. Among them, the compound 1-deoxynojirimycin (DNJ) was selected as the most typical and active chemical marker and quantified using an improved high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) normal phase coupled with evaporative light scattering detector (ELSD) method. The developed method was fully validated in terms of linearity, sensitivity, precision and repeatability, as well as recovery, and subsequently applied to evaluate twenty-nine batches of mulberry leaves from different collections. From the analytical data it was discovered that the average content of DNJ is 1.53 mg/g, while the total contents of DNJ in the 29 mulberry leaf sample ranged from 0.20 to 3.88 mg/g, which suggested remarkable differences, although it reached the highest levels in early August. These data may provide an important reference for the quality of mulberry leaves used as herbal medicine for the treatment of diabetes or as a material to obtain the DNJ of α-glucosidase inhibitor or as a functional food.
Highlights
IntroductionThe leaves of mulberry tree are considered as the food of silkworms and have been commonly used as a food, food additive and folklore medicine
Morus alba L., which is a Moraceous plant, has a history of over 4000 years in China.The leaves of mulberry tree are considered as the food of silkworms and have been commonly used as a food, food additive and folklore medicine
The leaves and root bark of the mulberry tree are known worldwide as sources of phytotherapeutics, which have traditionally been used for the treatment of conditions related to type II diabetes [1,2,3,4,5]
Summary
The leaves of mulberry tree are considered as the food of silkworms and have been commonly used as a food, food additive and folklore medicine. A large number of in vivo animal and human studies support the fact that the leaves and roots of mulberry tree have been commonly used as a traditional Chinese medicine for their hypolipidemic [6,7], antihypoglycemic [8,9,10], antioxidant [11,12,13], antihypertensive [14], anti-inflammatory [15,16], anti-atherosclerotic [17], antitumor [18], anticonvulsant [19] and vasodilator [20] effects. Phytochemical studies showed that mulberry leaves are rich in a variety of constituents, including flavonoids [21,22,23], alkaloids [24,25], Molecules 2016, 21, 206; doi:10.3390/molecules21020206 www.mdpi.com/journal/molecules constituents, including flavonoids [21,22,23], alkaloids [24,25],
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