Simultaneous determination of six steroidal saponins and one ecdysone in Asparagus filicinus using high performance liquid chromatography coupled with evaporative light scattering detection

A high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with an evaporative light scattering detector (HPLC–ELSD) has been developed to evaluate the quality of Asparagus filicinus through a simultaneous determination of six steroidal saponins and one ecdysone, including aspafiliosides A, B, C, E, G, filiasparoside A and 20-hydroxyecdysone. With a C18 analytical column, the seven analytes were separated efficiently using acetonitrile–water as the mobile phase in a gradient program. The method limits of detection ranged 0.125–0.225 μg, and the method limits of quantitation ranged 0.408–0.720 μg, respectively. The intra- and inter-day precisions of the method were evaluated and were all less than 3%. All the recoveries for the spiked analytes ranged 95.16%–100.61%. The proposed method was successfully applied to quantify the seven components in thirteen samples from different localities in China.