Comparative chemical characters of Sparganii Rhizoma from different regions in China

Abstract Objective To compare the chemical characters of Sparganii Rhizoma from different areas via chromatographic analysis and to establish a sensitive LC/MS method for quality assessment of Sparganii Rhizoma . Methods Under the optimised HPLC-PDA chromatographic conditions, twenty batches of Sparganii Rhizoma were analyzed by HPLC fingerprints. Principal component analysis (PCA), orthogonal projections to latent structures discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) were performed based on all peak areas of Sparganii Rhizoma fingerprints. Meanwhile, part of common peaks were subsequently quantified by UFLC-QTRAP-MS. Results The similarity values of HPLC fingerprints fluctuated in a wide range of 0.511–0.973, which showed variable differences of chemical characters among Sparganii Rhizoma from twenty habitats. PCA, OPLS-DA and HCA indicated that samples could be divided into five groups with different chemical characters, which generally corresponded with their geographical distributions. A total of 31 peaks in HPLC fingerprints were marked, and eight of them were identified and quantified. The quantitative result was generally in agreement with the classifications based on HPLC fingerprints, which indicated that Sparganii Rhizoma samples from eastern China mostly contained more contents including phenolic acids and flavonoids. Conclusion This study not only proved that there were relationships between geographic distributions and internal chemical compositions of plants, which could provide evidence to the traditional Chinese medicine concept “geo-authentic”, but also supplied a sensitive and rapid simultaneous quantitive method for the quality estimation of Sparganii Rhizoma .