The dicotyledon family Schisandraceae includes two genera Schisandra and Kadsura. Together there are about 50 species worldwide with the majority of their distribution found in Southeast Asia and North America. Schisandra is one of the medicinally important genuses with 30 species spread across the world, of which 19 are found in China .
Many species of the genus Schisandra have long been used as folk medicines in China. Among them, the most commonly used medicinal plants are Schisandra chinensis (Turcz.) Baill and Schisandra sphenanthera Rehd et Wils, which were also known as “Bei-Wuweizi” and “Nan-Wuweizi”, respectively. Since the majority of S. chinensis is distributed in northeastern China, Russia, Korea and Japan, and S. sphenanthera is distributed in the southern provinces of China.
An ultra performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) coupled with quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (QTOF-MS) procedure is designed for the first simultaneous analysis of nortriterpenoids and lignans in Schisandra samples. The method consists of three individual mass spectrometric experiments, including the full scan MS, MS/MS experiment and in-source collision induced dissociation (CID) MS/MS, which enable the identification of diagnostic fragmentation pathways of nortriterpenoids and lignans.
As such, a total of 6 nortriterpenoids and 10 lignans were unequivocally identified, and one nortriterpenoid and 20 lignans were tentatively identified from different Schisandra samples within 12.5 min. In addition, 6 nortriterpenoids and 10 lignans were quantified in 48 samples of S. chinensis and S. sphenanthera using an extract ion chromatogram (XIC) of the full scan MS experiment. Dataset obtained from UPLC–MS was processed with principal component analysis (PCA) and orthogonal partial least squared discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) to compare the difference between the two Schisandra
Researchers from Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences cooperated to study this job, and more details have been published in JOURNAL OF PHARMACEUTICAL AND BIOMEDICAL ANALYSIS. It also got supports from National Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences.