Supercritical fluid CO2 extraction and simultaneous determination of eight annonaceous acetogenins in Annona genus plant seeds by HPLC–DAD method

Annonaceous acetogenins (ACGs) isolated from Annonaceae plants exhibited a broad range of biological bioactivities such as cytotoxic, antitumoral, antiparasitic, pesticidal and immunosuppresive activities. However, their structures were liable to change at more than 60 °C and their extraction yields were low using traditional organic solvent extraction. In the present study, all samples from Annona genus plant seeds were extracted by supercritical carbon dioxide under optimized conditions and a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method was established for simultaneously determining eight ACGs. All of the eight compounds were simultaneously separated on reversed-phase C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm) with the column temperature at 30 °C. The mobile phase was composed of (A) methanol and (B) distilled water, the flow rate was 1.0 ml/min and the detection wavelength was set at 220 nm. All calibration curves showed good linear regression (γ > 0.9995) within the test range. The established method showed good precision and accuracy with overall intra-day and inter-day variations of 0.87–2.53% and 1.91–3.42%, respectively, and overall recoveries of 95.81–105.39% for the eight compounds analyzed. The established method can be applied to evaluate the intrinsic quality of Annonaceae plant seeds. The determination results recover the content-variation regularities of various ACGs in different species, which are helpful to choose the good-quality Annonaceae plant seeds for anticancer lead compound discovery.