Simultaneous Chromatographic Fingerprinting and Quantitative Analysis of Flemingia philippinensis by LC-DAD

To evaluate the quality of Flemingia philippinensis, a validated reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatographic method with diode-array detection has been developed for chromatographic fingerprint analysis and for quantification of genistin, genistein, and 5,7,3',4'-tetrahydroxy-6,8-diprenylisoflavone, the three main bioactive isoflavones. In the fingerprint analysis, 21 chromatographic peaks were selected as characteristic peaks; among these 14 flavonoids were identified on the basis of their retention times and UV spectra. In quantitative analysis, the recovery of the method was in the range 94.5-107.7%, and good linearity (r (2) > 0.9990) was observed for all the compounds over a relatively wide range of concentrations. The relative standard deviation of the method was less than 2.5% for intra-day and inter-day assays. The assay was successfully applied to analysis of the three active isoflavones in 19 samples. The results indicated the assay is reproducible and precise and could be used for convenient assessment of the quality of F. philippinensis.