Abstract
Multi-origin Chinese herbal medicines, with herbs originating from more than one species of plants, is a common phenomenon but an important issue in Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCMs). In the present study, a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS)—based fatty acid profiling approach to rapidly discriminate multi-origin Chinese medicines in terms of species and medicinal parts was proposed and validated using tuberous roots (Curcumae Radix) and rhizomes (Curcumae Rhizoma and Curcumae Longae Rhizoma) derived from four Curcuma species (e.g., C. wenyujin, C. kwangsiensis, C. phaeocaulis and C. longa) as models. Both type and content of fatty acids varied among different species of either tuberous roots or rhizomes, indicating each species has its own fatty acid pattern. Orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) and hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) based on dataset of global fatty acid profiling showed that either tuberous roots or rhizomes samples could be clearly classified into four clusters according to their species. Furthermore, those tested samples could also be discriminated in terms of their medicinal parts (e.g., tuberous root and rhizome). Our findings suggest that the proposed GC-MS-based fatty acid profiling followed by multivariate statistical analysis provides a reliable platform to discriminate multi-origin Chinese herbal medicines according to species and medicinal parts, which will be helpful for ensuring their quality, safety and efficacy.
Highlights
One medicinal herb originated from more than one species of plants, and one plant used as two or more medicines in terms of their different parts, are very popular phenomena in Traditional ChineseMedicines (TCMs)
An intra-day precision was achieved by analyzing the fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) mixed standards for six times successively, and 11 fatty acids detected in tested sample were selected to evaluate the instrumental drift
Either tuberous roots or rhizomes samples could be unambiguously divided into four main clusters according to their species. These results suggested that based on their fatty acid profiling, the Curcuma species of both tuberous roots and rhizomes could be discriminated according to their species using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis and multivariate statistical analysis, such as Orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) and hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA)
Summary
One medicinal herb originated from more than one species of plants, and one plant used as two or more medicines in terms of their different parts, are very popular phenomena in Traditional Chinese. An increasing number of studies have demonstrated that the chemical profiles of multi-origin Chinese herbal medicines, including Epimedii folium [2], Curcuma rhizomes [3] and Flos lonicerae [4], are obviously disparate according to different species, they are used as the same herb in the Chinese. We hypothesized that fatty acid profiling might be used to discriminate multi-origin Chinese herbal medicines according to their species, which is based on the fact that each species of plant with unique genotype presents the various metabolites, including fatty acid profiling [14]. In the present study, using tuberous roots and rhizomes of four Curcuma species as two model herbal medicines, a simple GC-MS based fatty acid profiling method was proposed to rapidly discriminate the different species of multi-origin Chinese herbal medicines
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