Sensitive determination of 4-O-methylhonokiol in rabbit plasma by high performance liquid chromatography and application to its pharmacokinetic investigation

A novel high Performance liquid Chromatographie method was developed for the determination of 4-O-methylhonokiol in rabbit plasma and was applied to its pharmacokinetic investigation. Plasma samples were treated by one-fold volume of methanol and acetonitrile to remove the interference proteins. A reverse phase column of SHIM-PACK VP-ODS (150 mm × 4.6 mm, 5.0 Mm) was used to separate 4-O-methylhonokiol in the plasma samples. The detection limit of 4-O-methylhonokiol was 0.2 μg/L and the linear ränge was 0.012 – 1.536 μg/L. The good extraction recoveries were obtained for the spiked samples (84.7%, 89.3% and 87.7% for low, middle and high concentrations of added Standards, respectively). The relative standard deviation of intra-day and inter-day precisions was in the ränge from 0.6% to 13.5%. The pharmacokinetic study of 4-O-methylhonokiol was made and the results from the plasma-concentration curve of 4-O-methylhonokiol showed a two-apartment open model. This work developed a sensitive, stable and rapid HPLC method for the determination of 4-O-methylhonokiol and the developed method has been successfully applied to a pharmacokinetic study of 4-O-methylhonokiol.