Psidium guajava, a popular food and medicine dual purposes plant cultivated in tropical and subtropical regions, has been widely used as food crop and folk medicine, such as anti-diabetes agent, around the world. Triterpenoids have been considered as the major active ingredients of P. guajava. In the present study, a high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with diode array and evaporative light scattering detectors (HPLC-DAD-ELSD) method was developed for simultaneous determination of nine triterpenoids in P. guajava. Pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) was performed for sample preparation, and the analysis was achieved on a Cosmosil 5C18-MS-II (Nacalai Tesque, Kyoto, Japan) column eluted with gradient 0.1% aqueous formic acid-methanol system. The drift tube temperature of ELSD was set at 40 °C, and nitrogen flow-rate was at 1.6 L/min. All calibration curves for the analytes showed good linear regression (R2 > 0.9992) within test ranges. The established method was validated for intra-day and inter-day precisions (RSDs < 5%) and accuracy (recovery 94.23-106.87%). The validated method was successfully applied to determinate nine triterpenoids in 15 samples from the leave or fruit of P. guajava. In addition, the α-glucosidase inhibition assay showed good α-glucosidase inhibition activity in almost all the determined triterpenoids. The present study suggested that triterpenoids should be the quality control markers for P. guajava and HPLC-DAD-ELSD was an effective tool for the quality control of P. guajava.
Keywords: HPLC–DAD–ELSD; Psidium guajava; corosolic acid; pressurized liquid extraction; triterpenoids; α-glucosidase inhibitory effect.