Drug discovery based on natural products like medicinal herbs remains challenging due to the technique limitations for rapidly screening and validating leads. To address the challenges, we employ the immobilized beta(2)-adrenergic recepotor (beta(2)-AR), an identified target of asthma, as the stationary phase in chromatographic column to screen compounds extracted from Stemonae Radix, Playtycodonis Radix , and Glycyrrhizae Radix et Rhizoma. To analyze binding properties of the extracted compounds to the immobilized receptors, we measured their retention behavior in the receptor chromatography and compared with six clinical asthma drugs. We identified tuberostemonine, platycodin D, and glycyrrhizic acid as the potential leads against asthma by our beta(2)-AR chromatography coupled with mass spectrum (MS). The association constants of the three compounds to beta(2)-AR were 2.85 x 10(-5), 2.55 x 10(-4), and 4.07 x 10(-6) M with the dissociation rate constants of 6.91 +/- 0.35, 11.88 +/- 0.60, and 9.49 +/- 0.64 min(-1), respectively. Tuberostemonine, a pentacyclic Stemona alkaloids, presented the most optimum values of binding efficiency index (BEI) and surface efficiency index (SEI) as close to the diagonal of SEI-BEI optimization plane when it is compared with platycodin D, glycyrrhizic and the six clinical drugs. Our results suggest that tuberostemonine is a promising natural product to be developed for treating asthma because it exhibits better drug-like binding properties to beta(2)-AR than the clinical drugs. As such, we demonstrate a chromatographic strategy to identify bioactive natural products based on the beta(2)-AR immobilization, which can be widely adopted to screen natural products from mixture of herbal extracts. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.