Escin Ia

Semen Aesculi, a traditional Chinese herbal medicine, has a long history of use for treating chest and abdominal pain with distension. In addition, the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum L.) is another species of Aesculus in Europe and has notable clinical significance in alleviating chronic venous insufficiency, hemorrhoids, and postoperative edema. Thus, highlighting the comparative study of Semen Aesculi and horse chestnut may broaden clinical applications.

To conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis on the chemical profiling of these two varieties and determine whether they have equivalent clinical efficacy by integrating plant metabolomics and multivariate statistical methods.

Initially, a comprehensive characterisation was performed using ultra‐performance liquid chromatography quadrupole time‐of‐flight tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC‐QTOF‐MS/MS) platform, and in total 44 active ingredients were identified. Then, untargeted metabolomics combined with principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares‐discriminant analysis (PLS‐DA) was applied for the discrimination of a German species and three official Chinese species. Next, 24 marker compounds responsible for the discrimination of different species were screened out and used to predict the species of unknown samples by genetic algorithm‐optimised support vector machine (GA‐SVM) with a high prediction accuracy. Finally, a heatmap visualisation was employed for clarifying the distribution of the identified active ingredients.

The three species of Chinese Semen Aesculi showed distinct separation from each other, while European horse chestnut and Aesculus chinensis Bunge were similar in chemical composition.

This work provided experimental evidence for further expanding the clinical application of Chinese Semen Aesculi and promoted the species identification and quality control of Semen Aesculi.

The sonoextn. (SE) of aescin saponins and phenolic compounds from the inedible seed kernels of Aesculus hippocastanum was optimized using a central composite rotatable design coupled with response surface methodol., where the joint effects of ultrasonic power, sonication time, and ethanol proportion were investigated.Flavonol glycosides (≥90% of the phenolic fraction), flavan-3-ols, phenolic acids, and aescin saponins were identified by HPLC-DAD-ESI/MSn, and the quant. data was fitted to a quadratic model to predict the optimal SE conditions.After validating the models, the significant effect of the three factors was confirmed.The extraction of flavonols was maximized to 48 ± 2 mg/g extract by SE at 105.9 W for 4.1 min in 83.9% ethanol, while 19.9 min sonication at 100.9 W in 95.8% ethanol favored the recovery of 3.8 ± 0.1 mg/g extract of aescin saponins.A process for simultaneous SE of both classes of phytochems. was also established.Overall, these SE processes proved to be time-saving and selective for the A. hippocastanum seed active constituents, which are cognized for their wide range of bioactivities and applications in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and food industries.