ИСТИНА

Ginseng (Pánax)— perennial plant from Araliaceae family. Includes 12 species found in Asia and North America. In Eastern folk medicine, these plants have been actively used for over 2000 years and it is believed that it prolongs life and preserves youth [1]. The main active ingredients of ginseng are ginsenosides. A ginsenoside molecule consists of two parts, a base (sapogenin) and saccharide side chains. Since ginseng is one of the most popular plants in the world used in phytomedicine, an important task is to quantify the content of ginsenosides. Our work is devoted to the finding of possible ways to estimate the total content of the main ginsenosides. One option is to determine the content of the corresponding aglycones (sapogenins) after the preliminary elimination of the saccharide substituents. To isolate the corresponding sapogenins, acid and alkaline hydrolysis schemes were developed based on the solutions of individual ginsenosides Rg1, Rb1, Ro, RT5. It was found that to conduct a total assessment of the ginsenoside content by preliminary hydrolysis, it is preferable to use alkaline reagents, since the presence of an unsaturated bond in the side chain of the most common aglycones - protopanaxadiol and protopanaxadiol leads to the formation of hydroxylation by-products. An HPLC-MS method was developed to separate and determine ginsenosides and their non-polar sapogenins simultaneously. The developed techniques have been successfully tested on ginseng root extracts. The degree of extraction of the sapogenin amounted to about 70%.