Abstract
Complex chemical composition is an important reason for restricting herbal quality evaluation. Despite the multi-components determination method significantly promoted the progress of herbal quality evaluation, however, which mainly concerned the total amount of multiple components and ignored the activity variation between each one, and did not accurately reflect the biological activity of botanical medicines. In this manuscript, we proposed a toxicity calibrated contents determination method for hyper toxic aconite, called toxic constituents index (TCI). Initially, we determined the minimum lethal dose value of mesaconitine (MA), aconitine (AC), and hypaconitine (HA), and established the equation TCI = 100 × (0.3387 ×XMA + 0.4778 ×XAC + 0.1835 ×XHA). Then, 10 batches of aconite were selected and their evaluation results of toxic potency (TP), diester diterpenoid alkaloids (DDAs), and TCI were compared. Linear regression analysis result suggested that the relevance between TCI and TP was the highest and the correlation coefficient R was 0.954. Prediction error values study also indicated that the evaluation results of TCI was highly consistent with that of TP. Moreover, TCI and DDAs were both applied to evaluate 14 batches of aconite samples oriented different origins; from the different evaluation results, we found when the proportion of HA was reached 25% in DDAs, the pharmacopeia method could generate false positive results. All these results testified the accuracy and universality of TCI method. We believe that this study method is rather accurate, simple, and easy operation and it will be of great utility in studies of other foods and herbs.
Highlights
The natural properties of botanical medicines determined the great variation of chemical composition and pharmacology activity (Li et al, 2007; Arceusz and Wesolowski, 2013; Ge et al, 2015)
toxic constituents index (TCI) and diterpenoid alkaloids (DDAs) were both applied to evaluate aconite samples oriented from different origins; from the different evaluation results, we revealed the influence of components proportion on the evaluation results, and demonstrated the universality of TCI
Focusing on the prediction error value, most sample error values obtained from TCI were less than that predicted by DDAs, while the only exception occurred in S5, and the prediction error from TCI was slightly higher than that of DDAs
Summary
The natural properties of botanical medicines determined the great variation of chemical composition and pharmacology activity (Li et al, 2007; Arceusz and Wesolowski, 2013; Ge et al, 2015). Fingerprint technology could only assess the similarity of chromatograph outline, and could not associate with biological activity. Multi-components determination mostly concerned the total content of multiple components, and ignored the activity variation of each ingredient (Lin et al, 2014). Some active components usually are the low abundance ones in medicinal plants, antitumor ingredient paclitaxel oriented from Taxus cuspidata is a good case (Zhang et al, 2015). It is an interesting and challenge work to develop a quality evaluation method to reflect the activity and content of multiple components at the same time
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