Determination of ferulic acid in rat plasma by LC-MS/MS

Objective To develop a simple,rapid and sensitive liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry(LC-MS/MS) method for the determination of ferulic acid in rat plasma.Methods Protein precipitation was used for the sample pretreatment with a plasma volume of 50 μL.The chromatographic separation was carried out on an Diamonsil C18 analytical column(150 mm×4.6 mm,5 μm).The compound separations were detected by an API 4000 mass spectrometer equipped with a TurboIonSprayTM interface.The compounds were quantified by multiple-reaction monitoring(MRM) mode using the transition mass of m/z 193.1→m/z 134.1 for ferulic acid and m/z 121.2→m/z 77.0 for benzoic acid.Results The method was linear over the range of 5.0-2 000.0 μg · L-1 and the lower limit of quantification(LLOQ) was 5.0 μg · L-1.The intra-and inter-day precision was within 15.0% in terms of relative standard deviation(RSD%).The average recoveries were between 91.0-100.5%,the matrix effects were between 87.8-89.7%.Conclusions This simple and sensitive LC-MS/MS method is successfully applied to pharmacokinetic studies of ferulic acid in SD rats after oral administration of 10 mg · kg-1 ferulic acid.