Identification of chemical constituents in Aster tataricus by UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS

The root of Aster tataricus L. f. (RA) has been widely used in the clinic for moistening lung, dispelling phlegm and relieving cough because of its significant therapeutic effects on respiratory diseases. In this study, a systematic data acquisition and mining strategy was established aimed at solving the complexity of the traditional Chinese medicine using ultra high performance liquid chromatography coupled with quadruple time of flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS). A total of 132 chemical constituents, including 43 terpenes, 31 flavonoids, 22 organic acids, 18 peptides, 9 coumarins, 3 steroids, 3 anthraquinones and 3 aldehydes were identified or tentatively characterized, among which 59 components were confirmed by comparison with the standard references. Meanwhile, the accurate mass measurements of the identified components were all with ±5 ppm error. Therefore, this work provided not only reliable data supports for the comprehensive analysis of the chemical constituents in RA, but also provided an efficient data acquisition and mining strategy to profile the chemical constituents for other traditional Chinese medicine complex system.