Chemical Composition Analysis of Water Extract of Naked Purple Pearl Based on UPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS
The medicinal herb of Callicarpa nudiflora Hook. et Arn, a plant belonging to the family Verbenaceae, is the dried leaf of Callicarpa nudiflora Hook. et Arn. It is also known as Fangfengchai, Jiejiehong, etc. It has a long history of medicinal use and has the effects of anti-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory, detoxifying, and hemostatic. It is mainly used to treat bacterial infections causing inflammatory swelling, acute infectious hepatitis, traumatic bleeding, and other diseases. It is included in the 2020 edition of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. Naked Purple Pearl is mainly distributed in Guangdong, Hainan, Malaysia and other places in China. It is a genuine medicinal herb in Hainan. The Li ethnic group in Hainan often uses water decoction to treat inflammation caused by bacterial infections, acute infectious hepatitis, respiratory and digestive bleeding, and other diseases.
The main components of naked flower purple pearl are flavonoids, phenylethanolic glycosides, cyclohexene ether terpenes, etc. Due to the advantages of UPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS technology, which combines the efficient separation ability, high detection sensitivity, and rich structural information collection of UPLC, it can quickly and efficiently identify compounds in natural medicines, effectively avoiding the problem of poor reliability of complex traditional Chinese medicine extract samples relying solely on retention time. Li et al. used UPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS to identify 17 compounds from different solvent extracts of Naked Purple Pearl; Yi et al. used UPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS to analyze and compare the chemical composition of different parts of the green leaves, yellow leaves, branches, and seeds of Naked Purple Pearl. Previous studies have mainly focused on the analysis of ethanol extracts from naked flower purple pearls. However, naked flower purple pearls are often boiled in water and consumed by the Li ethnic group, suggesting that the water-soluble components of naked flower purple pearls may contain many bioactive compounds. Therefore, in this study, UPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS technology was used to analyze and identify the chemical components of the water extract of naked flower purple pearl medicinal material, providing a scientific basis for the chemical composition of the water extract of naked flower purple pearl medicinal material and its subsequent development.

In this study, a total of 37 chemical components were identified from the water extract of naked flower purple pearl, including 16 phenylethanolic glycosides such as verbascoside, isoverbascoside, and forsythian glycoside B, 5 flavonoids such as verbascoside, and 16 cyclohexene ether terpenoids. However, Li et al. only identified 15 compounds from the water extract of Naked Purple Pearl. In addition, for the first time, this study discovered and identified three compounds, namely geniposide, forsythian glycoside E, and Cistanche deserticola glycoside F, from naked purple pearl.

Naked Purple Pearl Water Decoction is commonly used in folk medicine to treat inflammation caused by bacterial infections, acute infectious hepatitis, respiratory and digestive bleeding, and other diseases. Scholars at home and abroad have reported from the perspective of modern chemistry and pharmacological research. Guan et al. found that verbascoside has strong bactericidal, anti-inflammatory, antipyretic, and analgesic effects, exhibiting good antiviral and anti-tumor effects; Jiang et al. found that Forsythia suspensa glycoside B has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects, thereby improving the cardiac function damage caused by myocardial ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) model in rats; Zhang et al. found that verbascoside can significantly shorten activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT) and exert hemostatic effects by affecting endogenous coagulation pathways; Nam and Chae et al. found that isoverbascoside has significant anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activities, while Tang et al. found that both verbascoside and isoverbascoside can promote the proliferation of dendritic cells derived from mouse bone marrow, exhibiting certain neuroprotective effects. It can be seen that the biological activities of verbascoside, verbascoside, and isoverbascoside are related to the traditional efficacy of naked flower purple bead. In fact, compounds such as verbascoside and Forsythian B are often used as content determination indicators to evaluate the quality of naked flower purple bead. Therefore, verbascoside, verbascoside, and isoverbascoside can be used as indicator components of naked purple pearl.

In this paper, UPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS technology was used to identify the chemical components in the water extract of Callicarpa nudiflora, and combined with its pharmacological activity, the index components of Callicarpa nudiflora were inferred, which can provide a reference for the subsequent basic research of pharmacodynamic substances of Callicarpa nudiflora and the secondary development and quality control of traditional Chinese patent medicines and simple preparations.