Simultaneous Determination of Prostaglandin and Hormones in Excreta of Trogopterus xanthipes

Abstract

The excreta of Trogopterus xanthipes (also called Wulingzhi in Chinese, WLZ) is a well-known traditional Chinese medicine used for the treatment of irregular menstruation in clinic. Few reports are available on the chemical profiling of WLZ. In this work, qualitative and quantitative analyses of endogenous prostaglandin and hormones in WLZ were performed using UHPLC-orbitrap-MSn. In total, 48 compounds were identified in urine of T. xanthipes. Furthermore, the contents of four target compounds were simultaneously quantitated in 20 batches of samples by UPLC-MS/MS. The quantitative method showed a good linear correlation (R > 0.995) in a wide range for each compound. The method had a high sensitivity with LOD (0.5-1.0 ng/mL) and LOQ (1.0-2.5 ng/mL). The intra- and inter-day precisions were < 9.17 (RSD %), and repeatability and stability were < 6.14 (RSD %). The recovery of the analytes varied between 85.8% and 97.3% at three different concentrations. The present integrated qualitative and quantitative assessment of WLZ provides an evaluation strategy to assess the constituent in traditional Chinese medicine.