Szu Hsiu Liu, Hui Ping Tsai, Jiun Lin Guo, Lain Tze Lee, Yi-Hung Wen, Cheng Li Fang, Cheng Yu Lee and Shu Jiau Chiou
Bupleurum species represent one of the most successful and widely used herbal drugs for treatment of many diseases over the past 2000 years. Bupleurum chinense (B. chinense) is officially listed in China and Bupleurum kaoi (B. kaoi) is the only indigenous Bupleurum plant in Taiwan. Therefore, the aim of our study is to investigate the chemical components, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidants of B. kaoi and B. chinense. We report highly sensitive and specific assay for anti-inflammatory with a TNF-α luciferase plasmid vector. In preliminary experiments, we found that B. kaoi have stronger anti-inflammatory effects than B. chinense. However, it was no significant difference in the free radical scavenging activities of B. kaoi and B. chinense. We also demonstrated that saikosaponins (SS) a, SSc and SSd are the major compounds of B. kaoi and B. chinense in thin layer chromatography (TLC) analysis. The SSa, SSc and SSd content in B. kaoi has been reported to be higher than that in B. chinense. We combined TLC chromatograms with hierarchical clustering analysis(HCA)to classify into B. chinense and B. kaoi. The major impact feature were Rf 0.58(SSd) and Rf 0.44(SSc) .Theses studies showed that TLC chromatograms with HCA could be as tool in to differentiation and identify different species of herbal medicine in the future.