Global detection and identification of components from Yunnan Baiyao based on liquid chromatography hybrid ion trap time-of-flight mass spectrometry

Yunnan Baiyao is a widely used herbal prescription in traditional medicine for the treatment of bleeding and hematological diseases, while its chemical profile remains elusive. In this work, a novel methodology combining polarity-directed extraction technique with a diagnostic ion filtering strategy based on LC hybrid ion trap TOF-MS analysis was developed for global, efficient, and rapid characterization of components in Yunnan Baiyao. Di-ethyl ether, n-butanol, and ethanol/water (70:30, v/v) covering low-to-high polarity ranges were chosen as the extraction solvent, respectively. The results clearly showed that, compared with conventional single extraction solvent, collaboratively using extraction solvents with different polarities can effectively increase the number of detected peaks and enrich the product ions information in multistage mass spectra analysis. By further matching diagnostic ions and fragmental pathways, a total of 34 components were successfully identified. Our work clearly demonstrates that integrating polarity-directed extraction and diagnostic ion filtering techniques is a powerful and reliable strategy for global detection and identification of complex chemicalome from herbal prescriptions, and may open new avenues for chemical analysis in other complex mixtures.