Fingerprint analysis and simultaneous determination of phenolic compounds in extracts of curculiginis rhizoma by HPLC-diode array detector

Curculiginis Rhizoma (Curculigo orchioides Gaertn.) is a well-known Chinese herbal medicine, as well as an important Rasayana drug in India. Current criteria of quality control on this herb are to quantitatively analyze single compound curculigoside, which fail to comprehensively evaluate quality of this herb. In this paper, a simple and reliable HPLC coupled with diode array detector (DAD) method was developed to evaluate the quality of Curculiginis Rhizoma through establishing chromatographic fingerprint and simultaneously quantitating four phenolic compounds, orcinol glucoside, orcinol, 2,6-dimethoxybenzoic acid and curculigoside. The fingerprint displayed eleven common peaks, and the similarity index of different samples was in a range of 0.890-0.977. Validation of the method was acceptable, with 96.03-102.82% accuracy in recovery test and inter and intra-day precisions were less than 2%. This developed method by having a combination of chromatographic fingerprint and quantitation analysis could be applied to the quality control of Curculiginis Rhizoma.