HPLC analysis and pharmacokinetic study of quercitrin and isoquercitrin in rat plasma after administration of Hypericum japonicum thunb. extract.

A simple HPLC method was developed for determination of quercitrin and isoquercitrin in rat plasma. Reversed-phase HPLC was employed for the quantitative analysis using kaempferol-3-O--d-glucopyranoside-7-O--l-rhamnoside as an internal standard. Following extraction from the plasma samples with ethyl acetate-isopropanol (95:5, v/v), these two compounds were successfully separated on a Luna C18 column (250 × 4.6 mm, 5 µm) with isocratic elution of acetonitrile-0.5 aqueous acetic acid (17:83, v/v) as the mobile phase. The flow-rate was set at 1 mL/min and the eluent was detected at 350 nm for both quercitrin and isoquercitrin. The method was linear over the studied ranges of 50-6000 and 50-5000 ng/mL for quercitrin and isoquercitrin, respectively. The intra- and inter-day precisions of the analysis were better than 13.1 and 13.2, respectively. The lower limits of quantitation for quercitrin and isoquercitrin in plasma were both of 50 ng/mL. The mean extraction recoveries were 73 and 61 for quercitrin and i soquercitrin, respectively. The validated method was successfully applied to pharmacokinetic studies of the two analytes in rat plasma after the oral administration of Hypericum japonicum thunb. ethanol extract