Comparative pharmacokinetics of puerarin, daidzin, baicalin, glycyrrhizic acid, liquiritin, berberine, palmatine and jateorhizine by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry after oral administration of Gegenqinlian decoction and active components alignmen

• Four different types of compounds in rat plasma were determinated simultaneously.
• LC–MS/MS method was used in the pharmacokinetic studies of compounds of GQD and ACA.
• Pharmacokinetic parameters and Fre of compounds of ACA were all compared with GQD.
• Behaviors of compounds of ACA may be more similar to GQD than single one in vivo.

An LC–MS/MS method was developed for simultaneous analysis of puerarin, daidzin, baicalin, glycyrrhizic acid, liquiritin, berberine, palmatine and jateorhizine of Gegenqinlian Decoction (GQD) and active components alignment (ACA) in rat plasma using hesperidin as the internal standard (I.S.). Chromatography was performed using a C18 column, with gradient elution with 1% acetic acid–0.001 mol/L ammonium acetate and acetonitrile at 0.2 ml/min. All analytes including I.S. were monitored under positive ionization conditions by selected reaction monitoring with an electrospray ionization source. The optimized mass transition ion-pairs (m/z) for quantitation were 471/297 for puerarin, 471/255 for daidzin, 447/271 for baicalin, 823/453 for glycyrrhizic acid, 419/257 for liquiritin, 336/320 for berberine, 352/336 for palmatine, 338/322 for jateorhizine and 611/303 for hesperidin. The calibration curves were linear over the concentration ranges from 0.15–63.0 to 6.3–6340.0 ng/mL. Intra-day and inter-day precisions (RSD%) were within 15.0%, and accuracy (RE%) ranged from −7.4 to 13.2%. The extraction recoveries were ranged from 60.4 to 93.3%. The proposed method was further applied to compare the pharmacokinetics of all analytes following a single oral administration of GQD and ACA. In conclusion, the eight analytes of GQD and ACA had partly similar pharmacokinetics, which were different from single composition (such as puerarin).