Abstract
Steaming is a vital unit operation in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which greatly affects the active ingredients and the pharmacological efficacy of the products. Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has already been widely used as a strong process analytical technology (PAT) tool. In this study, the potential usage of NIR spectroscopy to monitor the steaming process of Gastrodiae rhizoma was explored. About 10 lab scale batches were employed to construct quantitative models to determine four chemical ingredients and moisture change during the steaming process. Gastrodin, p-hydroxybenzyl alcohol, parishin B, and parishin A were modeled by different multivariate calibration models (SMLR and PLS), while the content of the moisture was modeled by principal component regression (PCR). In the optimized models, the root mean square errors of prediction (RMSEP) for gastrodin, p-hydroxybenzyl alcohol, parishin B, parishin A, and moisture were 0.0181, 0.0143, 0.0132, 0.0244, and 2.15, respectively, and correlation coefficients (Rp2) were 0.9591, 0.9307, 0.9309, 0.9277, and 0.9201, respectively. Three other batches' results revealed that the accuracy of the model was acceptable and that was specific for next drying step. In addition, the results demonstrated the method was reliable in process performance and robustness. This method holds a great promise to replace current subjective color judgment and time-consuming HPLC or UV/Vis methods and is suitable for rapid online monitoring and quality control in the TCM industrial steaming process.
Highlights
Gastrodiae rhizoma (G. rhizoma), called “Tianma” in Chinese, which is regarded as one of the ten “magical plants” in China, has been widely used to treat diverse disease including headache, migraine, dizziness, epilepsy, infantile convulsion, tetany, and so on [1]
We developed an high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method for the quantitative determination of gastrodin, phydroxybenzyl alcohol, parishin A, and parishin B in the samples. e chromatographic analysis was carried on a Diamonsil C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm) at 30°C on a 1260 HPLC system (Agilent, Santa Clara, USA) consisting of a vacuum degasser, a thermostatic column compartment, a quaternary pump, an auto sampler, and a diode array detector (DAD). e mobile phase in this study consisted of 0.05% phosphoric acid solution (A) and acetonitrile (B) at a flow rate of 1.0 mL/minutes
A representative steaming process chromatogram is shown in Figure 1, which reflects that the four phenolic compounds were all baseline separated. e HPLC method was validated before analyzing the samples
Summary
Gastrodiae rhizoma (G. rhizoma), called “Tianma” in Chinese, which is regarded as one of the ten “magical plants” in China, has been widely used to treat diverse disease including headache, migraine, dizziness, epilepsy, infantile convulsion, tetany, and so on [1]. Various instrumental techniques and methods have been developed for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of G. rhizoma constituents, including high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) or LCMS, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and capillary electrophoresis (CE) [9,10,11,12]. These methods are often time-consuming, laborious, and tedious, since they require multiple steps of sample preparation
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