Chem. Pharm. Bull. 54(6) 897—901 (2006)

treat human disease in China for centuries. Because the content of each component varies significantly due to differences in geographic origin, climate condition, environment and other factors. It is therefore necessary to build up fingerprint chromatography on identifying and assessing the stability of the plants. Fingerprint is a kind of method to show chemical information of TCM with chromatograms, spectrograms and other graphs by chemical analytical techniques. Fingerprint analysis has been introduced and accepted by WHO as a strategy for the assessment of herbal medicines. And it is also required by the Drug Administration Bureau of China to standardize injections made from TCM and their raw materials. Cnidium monnieri (Chinese name Shechuangzi), the fruit of Cnidium monnieri (L.) CUSS., is a kind of herbal medicine commonly used in China for the treatment of kidney deficient and relieving rheumatism, chills and pains. It also could delay aging, build up strength, enhance immune function and adjust sex hormone level. The constituents in C. monnieri include osthole, umtatin, imperatorin, bergapten, isopimpinellin and xanthotoxin et al. The quality control of TCM using fingerprint will play an important role in the efficacy, safety and therapeutic reproducibility of C. monnieri. To check and prove the quality of TCM adequate analytical methods have to be applied to the quality control and quantitative analysis of the constituents. HPLC, because of its advantages and popularization, has been regarded as the conventional way on fingerprint analysis of C. monnieri in our laboratory. Recently, capillary electrophoresis (CE), as a more meaningful analysis technique for controlling the quality of herbal samples, has been attracting more and more people’s attention, because it is suitable for a wider range of complex analytical problems. High performance capillary electrophoresis (HPCE) is an automated analytical technique that separates species by applying voltage across buffer filled capillaries. It is generally used for the separation of charged compounds, which move at different speed depending on their size and charge. CE has the advantages of short analysis time, high separation efficiency and minimal consumption of the samples and solvents. In our study, we choose micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MEKC) as the separation mode due to absence of charge of coumarins. MEKC, an important mode of CE, was capable of separating charged or neutral compounds based on their relative affinities for the lipophilic interior and ionic exterior of a micellar pseudo-stationary phase. In our study, we introduce the MEKC in fingerprint analysis of C. monnieri for the first time. Throughout the study, we focused on the feasibility of this method by using HPCE in developing fingerprinting of C. monnieri and compared it with HPLC as a means of validating the CE assay.