OFFICINAL HERBS: FINGERPRINT OF HYDROALCOHOLIC EXTRACTS BY HPLC???UV???MS

In the last decades, the increasing interest towards genuine natural products and the intention to approach the nature as much as possible have further enhanced the attention to officinal herbs. Phytochemistry plays a fundamental role in herbal and botanical contexts. Its goals are the isolation, the analysis, the purification and the characterization of chemical structure and biological activity of plants constituents. Such characterization is based on the use of advanced instrumentation and has the aim to improve the knowledge of vegetable matrices and to lead to the purification of active principles upon which make studies about their possible therapeutical properties. At this purpose a systematic chemical characterization of a number as high as possible of officinal plants is necessary along with analogous studies of their commercially available formulations (13 hydroalcoholic extracts, powders, infusions etc.). As a matter of fact it is important to verify if the substances present in herbal plants are effectively transferred to the finished products. We present here a preliminary work about the characterization of some commercial formulations (hydroalcoholic extracts) of officinal herbs largely consumed both in Italy and Europe for which only partial studies are present in literature. Due to the complexity of the vegetable matrices the chromatographic separation is an important step of the analytical study. For every plant extract optimized chromatographic conditions were evaluated in order to separate the most important analytes. The double detection system UV-MS allowed the structural characterization of many constituents. We achieved in this way a reliable and detailed fingerprint of each extracted plant particularly useful as quality control and as starting point for future purification studies concerning possible biological activity of some components.