Metabonomics Study On The Quality Evaluation And Hepatoprotective Effect Of Moutan Cortex

Moutan Cortex is an important Traditional Chinese Medicine owing to its several bioactivities. The current methods of quality controlling for Moutan Cortex, which was limited to detect the level of several ingradients, are less likely to achieve the scientific and comprehensive evidences. Moreover, recent research showed that Moutan Cortex have obvious hepatoprotective effect for liver injury rats, whereas the hepatoprotective mechanism for Moutan Cortex have’t been reported yet.In the thesis, metabonomics based on High Performance Liquid Chromatography coupled with Quadrupole Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (HPLC/Q-TOF-MS) was applied to carry out the analysis of Moutan Cortex metabolome, quality assessment for different growth stages and different cultivars of Moutan Cortex as well as its hepatoprotective mechanism. The results indicated that 46 metabolites including 5 primary metabolites and 41 secondary ones were identified in the extracts of Moutan Cortex by MS molecular ions, major fragments in conjugation with literature data. On the basis of MS analysis, it was summarized in the relationship between structural features and the corresponding characteristic fragmentation behavior for phenolics, flavonoids, monoterpene glycosides and acetophenones.Moreover, the results showed that 13 metabolites were related to the growth stages of Moutan Cortex while 3-year-old Moutan Cortex contained the highest level of important active compounds among three stages, such as paeonol and monoterpene glucosides. These results demonstrated that the good quality of Moutan Cortex was associated with the longer growth time. Some secondary metabolites, such as galloyl glucose, procyanidins, mudanpiosides, will become the novel and potential chemotaxonomic markers to differ tree peony cultivars when the conventional classification methods are not practicable. The ’Yingrihong’cultivar with red flowers showed the higher levels of monoterpene metabolites, flavonoids and phenolics, suggesting that the red flower cultivar is more suitable for drug use.The last but not least, the CCl4 induced liver injury model was used to investigate the hepatoprotective effect for Moutan Cortex. The urinary metabonomic analysis revealed that Moutan Cortex has hepatoprotective function based on the decreasing contents of allantoin, homovanillic acid, biotin, and that the protect effect of post-treatment is more obvious than pre-treatment. Besides, the hepatoprotective effect of Moutan Cortex could be achieved by regulating other metabolites such as vitamin H.