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Profiling of the charged metabolites of traditional herbal medicines using capillary electrophoresis time-of-flight mass spectrometry

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Abstract

The quantification of a small number of bioactive components in herbal medicines is often inadequate when attempting to elucidate a medicine’s biological effects. Despite rapid advances in analytical technologies, obtaining comprehensive metabolomic profiles of herbal medicines remains difficult, due to the complexity of natural product mixtures. Toki-Shakuyaku-San is a Chinese medicine used widely to treat gynecological and obstetric disorders, such as infertility, dysmenorrhea, toxemia during pregnancy and neural dysfunction. It consists of Angelica acutiloba Radix (Toki), Cnidium officinale Rhizoma (Senkyu), Paeonia lactiflora Radix (Shakuyaku), Atractylodes lancea Rhizoma (Sojutsu), Alisma orientale Rhizoma (Takusha) and Poria cocos Hoelen (Bukuryo). To elucidate the composition of these herbal medicines individually, we conducted non-targeted profiling analyses of extracts of these herbs using capillary electrophoresis time-of-flight mass spectrometry (CE-TOFMS), which allows the simultaneous quantification of hundreds of charged metabolites. In total, 737 ± 183.1 (average ± SD) metabolite-derived features were observed, and of these, 119 metabolites were identified. Score plots of principal component analysis (PCA) showed a clear cluster including Shakuyaku, Bukuryo, and Sojutsu, while the other three herbs were distributed over PCA spaces. Loading plots revealed that amino acids and shikimate-derived alkaloids were the predominant metabolite constituents. Hierarchical clustering analysis revealed that few clusters overlapped in the herbal medicines tested. This report is the first demonstration of the characterization of a herbal medicine using large-scale metabolomic analysis, which is complementary to traditional quality control methods.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by research funds from the Yamagata Prefectural Government and the city of Tsuruoka. We thank Dr. Kazuko Otomo for technical assistance, and Wanjun Kong and Guo Jing for fruitful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University, Tsuruoka, Yamagata, 997-0052, Japan

    Keiko Iino, Masahiro Sugimoto, Tomoyoshi Soga & Masaru Tomita

  2. Department of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, 252-8520, Japan

    Keiko Iino, Tomoyoshi Soga & Masaru Tomita

  3. Systems Biology Program, Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, 252-8520, Japan

    Masahiro Sugimoto, Tomoyoshi Soga & Masaru Tomita

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  1. Keiko Iino
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  2. Masahiro Sugimoto
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  4. Masaru Tomita
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Correspondence to Masahiro Sugimoto.

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Iino, K., Sugimoto, M., Soga, T. et al. Profiling of the charged metabolites of traditional herbal medicines using capillary electrophoresis time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Metabolomics 8, 99–108 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-011-0290-7

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