Detection of related substances in polyene phosphatidyl choline extracted from soybean and in its commercial capsule by comprehensive supercritical fluid chromatography with mass spectrometry compared with high-performance liquid chromatography with evaporative light scattering detection.

Supercritical fluid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry was used to comprehensively profile polyene phosphatidyl choline (PPC) extracted from soybean. We achieved an efficient chromatographic analysis using a BEH-2EP column (3 x 100 mm(2), 1.7 mu m) with a mobile phase consisting of CO2 and a cosolvent in gradient combination at a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. The cosolvent consisted of methanol, acetonitrile, and water (containing 10 mM ammonium acetate and 0.2% formic acid). The total single-run time was 7 min. We used this method to accurately detect ten different phospholipids (PLs) during extraction. The limits of quantification for phosphatidyl choline, lyso-phosphatidylcholine (LPC), phosphatidic acid (PA), sphingomyelin, phosphatidyl glycerol, phosphatidyl inositol (PI), cholesterol, cardiolipin, phosphatidyl serine, and phosphatidyl ethanolamine (PE) were 20.6, 19.52, 1.21, 2.38, 0.50, 2.28, 54.3, 0.60, 0.65, and 4.85 ng/mL, respectively. However, adopting the high-performance liquid chromatography with evaporative light scattering detection method issued by the China Food and Drug Administration, only PA, LPC, PE, PI, and PPC could be analyzed accurately, and the limits of quantification were 33.89, 60.5, 30.3, 10.9, and 61.79 mu g/mL, respectively. The total single-run time was at the least 20 min. Consequently, the supercritical fluid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry method was more suitable for the analysis of related PLs.