Abstract:
The traditional commodity specifications of Chinese medicinal materials are mainly divided into different grades based on macroscopic characteristics. As the basis for high quality and good price, there is still a lack of systematic evaluation on whether they are consistent with the current standards and whether they can reflect the internal quality of medicinal material.
Panax notoginseng is a commonly used, large consumption of Chinese medicinal material. At present, it is divided into 8 grades in the market based on "Tou" (the number of crude drug /500 g), but it is not related to the standard of total saponins of
Panax notoginseng (the sum of three saponins) in Chinese Pharmacopoeia. In this study, ultra-performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole-time of flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS) coupled with mass spectrometry molecular network were used for the rapid identification of saponins of
Panax notoginseng with different "Tou" and a total of 64 saponins were identified. Seventeen saponins related to "Tou" were screened by orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA). The content of five saponins R
1, Rb
1, Rg
1, Rd, and Re in
Panax notoginseng with different "Tou" was determined by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The results of correlation analysis showed that Rd and R
1 with the largest VIP values among the differential saponins, which significantly negatively correlated with "Tou" (
P < 0.05). Based on the determination results of 36 batches of samples, using Rd/Total
Panax notoginseng saponins (TPNS) ratio (> 0.08) as the index,
Panax notoginseng can be divided into two grades: 20-60 "Tou" (superior) and 80-200 "Tou" (qualified). Based on the concept of "macroscopic characteristics and chemical profiling", this study integrates the non-targeted analysis and quantitative determination methods to provide a new strategy for quality evaluation of
Panax notoginseng.