QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE GENTIAN BY CHEMICAL PATTERN RECOGNITION

Methanol extracts of 38 samples of the treditional Chinese medidciegentian of different origin were prepared. Data reflecting thtir chemical constituentsas a whole were obtained by HPLC. The Chinese Pharmacopoeia (1990) specifiedfour species of the getiana as authentic. Some samples from the authentic andnon-authentic gentian were used as the training set of pattern recognition. Chemicalfeatures of the gentian samples were selected from among the matching data of HPLC bythe SIMCA program.Finally, the selected chemical features were displayed as stars in asemicircular polar coordinate system, resulting in a constellation graph. Quality assess-ment of the traditional Chinese medicine gentian was accomplished by recognizing the posi-tion and path of the stars in the constellation graph. The clusters of the gentian samples inthe constellation graph obtained from the HPLC features were consistent with and comple-ment to their plant taxonomy. The vivid graph demonstrated that pattern recognition viachemical constellation promisses well a reliable method for assessing traditional Chinesemedicines.