Abstract
This paper reports a simple, rapid, and effective method for simultaneous detection of cartap (Ca), thiocyclam (Th), and tebufenozide (Te) in Chinese herbal medicines including Radix Angelicae Dahuricae and Liquorices using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) coupled with partial least squares regression (PLSR). The proposed method can handle the intrinsic interferences of herbal samples; satisfactory average recoveries attained from near-infrared (NIR) and mid-infrared (MIR) PLSR models were 99.0±10.8 and 100.2±1.0% for Ca, 100.2±6.9 and 99.7±2.5% for Th, and 99.1±6.3 and 99.6±1.0% for Te, respectively. Furthermore, some statistical parameters and figures of merit are fully investigated to evaluate the performance of the two models. It was found that both models could give accurate results and only the performance of MIR-PLSR was slightly better than that of NIR-PLSR in the cases suffering from herbal matrix interferences. In conclusion, FT-IR spectroscopy in combination with PLSR has been demonstrated for its application in rapid screening and quantitative analysis of multipesticide residues in Chinese herbal medicines without physical or chemical separation pretreatment step and any spectral processing, which also implies other potential applications such as food and drug safety, herbal plants quality, and environmental evaluation, due to its advantages of nontoxic and nondestructive analysis.
Highlights
Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) which were considered to be gentle, nontoxic, and even harmless have been widely used as a means of medication or dietary supplement [1, 2]
Based on the available literature, a number of analytical methods have been proposed for the determination of pesticide residues in different matrices [7,8,9,10,11,12], including gas chromatography (GC), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and ultrahigh performance liquid chromatographymass spectrometry (UPLC-MS)
For the NIR spectra of multipesticide residues in Radix Angelicae Dahuricae samples as shown in Figure 1(a1), it can be seen that the characteristic absorption peaks can be interpreted as follows [33, 34]: the peak 4251 cm−1 is the C-H stretch/C-H deformation in the phenyl or CH2 bend second overtone and around 4340 cm−1 can be attributed to the combination absorbance of C-H antisymmetric stretching and C-H bending
Summary
Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) which were considered to be gentle, nontoxic, and even harmless have been widely used as a means of medication or dietary supplement [1, 2]. The widespread use of pesticides poses high risks to the environment and induces heavy adverse effects on human health [3,4,5,6] Facing such a serious crisis, for safety and health, it is important to establish an effective routine method for quantifying multipesticide residues in Chinese herbal medicines. Based on the available literature, a number of analytical methods have been proposed for the determination of pesticide residues in different matrices [7,8,9,10,11,12], including gas chromatography (GC), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and ultrahigh performance liquid chromatographymass spectrometry (UPLC-MS) These techniques are time-consuming and reagent-demanding and require highly skilled operators.
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