A single, multi-faceted, enhanced strategy to quantify the chromatographically diverse constituents in the roots of Euphorbia kansui

Kansui radix is a famous poisonous traditional Chinese medicine. However, due to its different types of constituents with broad polarity, a variety of UV absorptions and lack of the reference standards, it was difficult to simultaneously determine the main component in kanui radix. A single, multi-faceted, enhanced strategy, exogenous reference standard – single standard to determine multi-components method (ERS-SSDMC), was proposed. Thirteen major components of kansui radix, including three jatrophane diterpenoids, eight ingenane diterpenoids and two triterpenes, among which there were three pairs of isomers, were simultaneously assayed. A C8 column, packed with 2.7   μm core–shell particles, was optimized to separate these constituents in 25   min on HPLC instrument detected at a program wavelength. Ethyl benzoate employed as single exogenous reference standard. The method was fully validated with respect to linearity ( r 2   >   0.9995), LOQs (0.1–0.4   μg/mL), precision, accuracy (92–114%, RSD   <   4.4%) and stability. The robustness of the method was performed by Plackett–Burmantest tests which eight primary chromatographic parameters were investigated. It was found that the two factors, wavelength and flow rate, should be strictly controlled. A total of 75 batches of kansui radix and its three different processing products were successfully analyzed and discriminated by applying the proposed method. This work demonstrates an effective strategy for the SSDMC method making the simultaneous assay of complex multi-component TCM system achievable.