High-Performance Liquid Chromatography with Electrospray Mass Spectrometry for Rapid and Sensitive Determination of Sanguinarine and Chelerythrine in Exogenously Contaminated Honey

A simple, rapid, and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method coupled with electrospray mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) has been used to determine sanguinarine and chelerythrine in exogenously contaminated honey. Sample extracts were separated on a C₈ reversed-phase HPLC column with acetonitrile–acetate buffer (40:60) as mobile phase. After ESI the abundance of protonated molecules was recorded by selected-ion recording (SIR) of m/z 332.5, 348.5, and 356.5 for sanguinarine, chelerythrine, and the internal standard, tetrahydropalmatine, respectively. The internal standard technique was used to construct calibration plots for quantitation of sanguinarine and chelerythrine; the linear ranges were 5.25–1050 and 3.75–750 ng mL^–1, respectively, with correlation coefficients of 0.9993 and 0.9989, respectively. The limits of detection for sanguinarine and chelerythrine were 1.60 and 1.11 ng mL^–1, respectively.