Determination of three compounds in Aloe vera by capillary electrophoresis

A capillary electrophoretic assay for determining aloe‐emodin (AE), methyl p ‐coumarate (MC), and 3,4‐dihydro‐6,8‐dihydroxyl‐[(3s)‐2′‐acetyl‐3′‐hydroxyl‐5′‐methoxy‐benzyl]‐isocoumarin (DDI) in Aloe vera has been developed. Baseline separation was achieved within 15 min using a running buffer of 20 mm borax containing 10% (v/v) acetonitrile at pH 10.5. A linear relationship between the peak area and the concentration of the analytes was found in the ranges 5–500, 10–1000 and 2–1000 µg/mL for AE, MC and DDI, respectively, with correlation coefcients of 0.9992–0.9998. The relative standard deviations of migration time and peak area were within 0.17–0.19 and 1.52–3.37%, respectively. The recoveries of AE, MC and DDI were 105, 102 and 96.4%. The contents of AE, MC and DDI in Aloe vera were measured to be 5.13, 0.768 and 1.30 mg/g, respectively. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.