Boronate affinity mesoporous silica nanoparticle based selective enrichment for highly efficient analysis of ginsenosides

Panax ginseng has been one of the most famous traditional herbs in eastern Asia as well as North America for thousands of years. Ginsenosides are considered to be the main bioactive constituent with diverse pharmacological functions. Thus, selective analysis of ginsenosides is of great importance for both the medical perspective and quality control of Panax ginseng. However, the conventional RPLC is not suitable for the analysis of ginsenosides because of the strong polarity of the glycosyl chain. Herein, by employing boronate affinity mesoporous silica nanoparticles (BA-MSNs) as a selective sorbent, we have developed a boronate affinity chromatography based strategy for the analysis of ginsenosides. As compared to the standard analytical approach (Chinese Pharmacopoeia 2015), the proposed method did not require tedious sample pretreatment, but provided a significantly improved performance, including excellent selectivity, high binding capacity and fast binding equilibrium. Using ginsenosides Re, Rb1 and Rb2 as representative targets, efficient qualitative and quantitative analyses of ginseng were performed, suggesting a promising outlook for the proposed method in real-world applications.

人参在东亚以及北美洲数千年来一直是最著名的传统草药之一。人参皂苷被认为是具有多种药理功能的主要生物活性成分。因此，人参皂苷的选择性分析对于人参的医学研究和质量控制都非常重要。然而，由于糖基链的强极性，常规的反相液相色谱法不适合用于人参皂苷的分析。在此，我们通过使用硼酸亲和介孔二氧化硅纳米粒子（BA - MSNs）作为选择性吸附剂，开发了一种基于硼酸亲和色谱的人参皂苷分析策略。与标准分析方法（《中国药典》2015年版）相比，所提出的方法不需要繁琐的样品预处理，但性能显著提高，包括优异的选择性、高结合容量和快速的结合平衡。以人参皂苷Re、Rb1和Rb2作为代表性目标物，对人参进行了高效的定性和定量分析，这表明所提出的方法在实际应用中具有良好的前景。