Sensitive determination of 4-O-methylhonokiol in rabbit plasma by high performance liquid chromatography and application to its pharmacokinetic investigation

A novel high performance liquid chromatographic method was developed for the determination of 4-O-methylhonokiol in rabbit plasma and was applied to its pharmacokinetic investigation.Plasma samples were treated by one-fold volume of methanol and acetonitrile to remove the interference proteins.A reverse phase column of SHIMPACK VP-ODS (150 mm× 4.6 mm,5.0 μm) was used to separate 4-O-methylhonokiol in the plasma samples.The detection limit of 4-O-methylhonokiol was 0.2 μg/L and the linear range was 0.012- 1.536 mg/L.The good extraction recoveries were obtained for the spiked samples (84.7%,89.3% and 87.7% for low,middle and high concentrations of added standards,respectively).The relative standard deviation of intra-day and inter-day precisions was in the range from 0.6% to 13.5%.The pharmacokinetic study of 4-O-methylhonokiol was made and the results from the plasmaconcentration curve of 4-O-methylhonokiol showed a two-apartment open model.This work developed a sensitive,stable and rapid HPLC method for the determination of 4-O-methylhonokiol and the developed method has been successfully applied to a pharmacokinetic study of 4-O-methylhonokiol.