Geographical discrimination of Flos Trollii by GC-MS and UHPLC-HRMS-based untargeted metabolomics combined with chemometrics

Abstract

For centuries, Flos Trollii has been consumed as functional tea and a folk medicine in China's north and northwest zones. The quality of Flos Trollii highly depends on the producing zones. Unfortunately, few studies have been reported on the geographical discrimination of Flos Trollii. This work comprehensively investigated Flos Trollii compounds with an integration strategy combining gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (UHPLC-HRMS) with chemometrics to explore the differences between Flos Trollii obtained from various origins of China. About 71 volatile and 22 involatile markers were identified with GC-MS and UHPLC-HRMS, respectively. Geographical discrimination models were synthetically investigated based on the identified markers. The results indicated that the UHPLC-HRMS coupled with the fisher discrimination model provided the best prediction capability (>97%). This study provides a new solution for Flos Trollii discrimination.