Development of sample preparation method for isoliquiritigenin, liquiritin, and glycyrrhizic acid analysis in licorice by ionic liquids-ultrasound based extraction and high-performance liquid chromatography detection

An ionic liquid-based ultrasonic-assisted extraction (ILUAE) method had been used for the effective extraction of isoliquiritigenin (IQ), liquiritin (LQ) and glycyrrhizic acid (GA) from licorice. The ionic liquids with different cations and anions were investigated in this work and 0.5 M 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium bromide solution was selected as solvent. In addition, the technical parameters including soaking time, solid–liquid ratio, ultrasonic power and time were optimized. Compared with the conventional solvent extraction, the proposed approach exhibited higher efficiency, which indicated the ILUAE was an efficient, rapid and simple sample preparation technique. There was no degradation of the target analytes had been observed at the optimum conditions which was evidenced by the stability studies performed with standard of IQ, LQ and GA. The proposed method also showed high reproducibility and was environmental friendly.