Fingerprint analysis of medical herbals

Herbal medicine plays an essential role in modern human life. Identification and quantification of chemical markers are crucial to the quality control of herbal medicines. Usually, control methods like thin layer chromatography (TLC) and other chromatographic methods are based on Pharmacopoeia methods in every country or region. The resulting data contain only general information about some compounds, but lack any fast-accessible information for determination of differences and similarities of samples as complex systems. Objective: To describe methods for the rapid element and compound composition analysis of plant material using like atomic spectroscopy and molecular spectroscopy in conjunction with chemometrics. Medical herbals, atomic spectroscopy methods (ED-XRF, ICP, LIBS) and molecular spectroscopy (FTIR, Raman). The spectral patterns were used for Multivariate principal component analyses by SIMCA strategy. All spectra were smoothed and normalised before chemometric studies. Using SIMCA 14 software — the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) was performed by using Savitzky-Golay and 2nd derivative filter. For the HCA, Ward’s algorithm was used. A comparison between spectra recorded by atomic spectroscopy and molecular spectroscopy sampling methods showed high sensitivity and good discrimination of herbal species based on spectral information. The sensitivity of the methods and the reliability of the obtained results were tested using reference materials. The results show the possibility to describe samples and identify similarities and differentiate based on a complex pattern of spectral lines measured by different analytical techniques. The proposed strategy for plant material sample chemical composition screening allows the quick method to improve laboratory work efficiency, reduce unnecessary analysis and rapid method for control reliability of results of more complex chemical methods, such as ICP-MS, HPLQ-MSERAF Post-doctoral Research Support Program project Nr. 1.1.1.2/16/I/001. Research application "Development of screening methods by innovative spectroscopy techniques and chemometrics in research of herbal medicine", Nr. 1.1.1.2/VIAA/2/18/273.