Simultaneous determination of eight flavonoids in propolis using chemometrics-assisted high performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection

• A new HPLC-DAD analysis of eight flavonoids assisted by ATLD was proposed.
• The sample pretreatment was simple and the analysis time was relatively short.
• Baseline drift and peak overlapping were successfully resolved by our method.
• The analytical method has been applied for 3 kinds of propolis capsules analysis.
• The results are satisfactory even in the presence of matrix interferences.

A fast analytical strategy of second-order calibration method based on the alternating trilinear decomposition algorithm (ATLD)-assisted high performance liquid chromatography coupled with a diode array detector (HPLC-DAD) was established for the simultaneous determination of eight flavonoids (rutin, quercetin, luteolin, kaempferol, isorhamnetin, apigenin, galangin and chrysin) in propolis capsules samples. The chromatographic separation was implemented on a Wondasil™ C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm) within 13 min with a binary mobile phase composed of water with 1% formic acid and methanol at a flow rate of 1.0 mL min−1 after flavonoids were only extracted with methanol by ultrasound extraction for 15 min. The baseline problem was overcome by considering background drift as additional compositions or factors as well as the target analytes, and ATLD was employed to handle the overlapping peaks from analytes of interest or from analytes and co-eluting matrix compounds. The linearity was good with the correlation coefficients no less than 0.9947; the limit of detections (LODs) within the range of 3.39–33.05 ng mL−1 were low enough; the accuracy was confirmed by the recoveries ranged from 91.9% to 110.2% and the root-mean-square-error of predictions (RMSEPs) less than 1.1 μg/mL. The results indicated that the chromatographic method with the aid of ATLD is efficient, sensitive and cost-effective and can realize the resolution and accurate quantification of flavonoids even in the presence of interferences, thus providing an alternative method for accurate quantification of analytes especially when the complete separation is not easily accomplished. The method was successfully applied to propolis capsules samples and the satisfactory results were obtained.