Determination of bavachin and isobavachalcone in Fructus Psoraleae by high-performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection

A simple, sensitive and selective method of high-performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection (HPLC-ECD) has been developed for simultaneous determination of bavachin and isobavachalcone in Fructus Psoraleae. At optimized conditions, bavachin and isobavachalcone could be well separated within 15 min at a detection potential of +0.80 V with 0.03 mol/L acetate buffer solution (pH 5.17)/acetonitrile (2:3, v/v) as the mobile phase. The relationships between peak areas and concentrations were linear from 8.26 × 10(-7) to 1.21 × 10(-4) mol/L for bavachin, and from 1.01 × 10(-8) to 1.61 × 10(-4) mol/L for isobavachalcone, respectively. The method offered excellent linearity with regression coefficient R(2) >0.995. The method presented detection limits (S/N = 3) of 8.81 × 10(-9) mol/L for bavachin and 1.17 × 10(-10) mol/L for isobavachalcone. It indicates that the sensitivity of electrochemical detection is ten times higher than that of diode array detection (DAD). The mean recoveries around 98% with a relative standard deviation less than 3.1% for the two analytes have been obtained. The proposed separation and detection procedures were successfully applied to the simultaneous determination of bavachin and isobavachalcone in traditional Chinese medicine.