Quantitative determination of psoralen and angelicin from some medicinal herbs by high performance liquid chromatography.

A reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatographic method was developed to determine the contents of psoralen and angelicin from some medicinal herbs. The optimum eluent for chromatography was 20 v/v% acetonitrile in water on a Zorbax 300SB C18 column. The identification was carried out by comparing the retention time and mass spectra of the relevant peaks with their standards. The variation of the concentration of psoralen and angelicin was wide between different species. The seeds of Psoralea corylifolia showed the highest contents of psoralen (7.8 mg/g) and angelicin (2.3 mg/g) among the tested herbs.