DETERMINATION OF GELSEMIUM ALKALOIDS BY RP-HPLC

Gelsemium elegans Benth is a kind of traditional Chinese medicine, eight alkaloids have been isolated from this herb.In recent years, an HPLC method for the separation and determination of five of these alkaloids, ie. gelsemium A (G), koumine (F), kumantenidine (D), kumantenine (B) and kumantenmine (A) is described, dichroine being used as the internal standard. In this report a RP column of C₁₈ and the mobile phase methanol—water—n-butylamine (78:22:0.1 V/V) were employed. The flow rate was 1.0 ml/min, the column temperature was 25℃ and the detection wavelength was 256 nm.The calibration curves showed good linearity over the range of 0.02～0.12 μg, r=0.9835～0.9977 and the recoveries were 95.01～99.70% for the five alkaloids.The method is simple, sensitive and reproducible and can be used for the quality control of Gelsemium preparations for clinical evaluation.