Introductory Chapter

Abstract

The Ephedra plant, or “Mahuang” of traditional Chinese medicine, is one of the oldest medicinal plants known to mankind. More than 45 species of Ephedra plants exist and are indigenous to regions of Asia, North, Central and South America and Europe. Mahuang contains ephedrine alkaloids as their principal components, which are primarily localized in the aerial parts of the plant [1]. In recent years, many herbs used in popular medicine have been reported to contain polysaccharides with a great variety of biological activities and the polysaccharides are also demonstrated to be one of the main bioactive constituents of Ephedra plant except for a series of ephedrine alkaloids [2-4]. For these reasons, great interest arose on the reliable analytical methods of the Mahuang polysaccharides, which can be used for exploring the new functional products with polysaccharides due to its pharmacological importance and application in the pharmaceutical industry. Immunosuppressive effects of acidic polysaccharides from the stems of E. sinica have been demonstrated by carbon clearance test, delayed type hypersensitivity reaction and humoral immune response in vivo [2]. The commonly used separation techniques for carbohydrate analysis are gas chromatography (GC), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and capillary electrophoresis (CE) [5-7]. GC is a very classical method to analyze monosaccharide compositions of polysaccharides. Neutral monosaccharides are derivatized by silylation or acetylation before analysis, whereas acidic monosaccharides such as glucuronic acid and galacturonic acid can not be derivatized at all [8]. The uronic acid contents can be calculated by the difference between before and after carboxyl reduction of polysaccharides [9, 10]. So it is very laborious to calculate the uronic acid contents by GC method. Most of the HPLC and CE techniques are often used labeling with either fluorescence or UV tags for enhanced detection because these native carbohydrates are lack of chromophores or fluorophores in the structure. The reagent 1-phenyl-3-methyl-5-pyrazolone (PMP) is one of the popular labels that react with the reducing carbohydrate under mild conditions, requiring no acid catalyst and causing no desialylation and isomerization [11-16]. CE seems to possess several