Applied Research, Based On Hyphenated Chromatographic And Chemometric Methods Of Chinese Medicine

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an analytical system with too much complexity. Usually, there are a lot of chemical components in TCM and most of them are with low concentration. As a result, common analytical instruments and detecting approaches can not make the need to qualitatively and quantitatively determine chemical components from TCM completely. With the advent of hyphenated chromatographic instruments such as GC-MS and HPLC-DAD and the rapid development of some chemometric multi-resolution techniques like HELP, it is possible to completely conduct the qualitative and quantitative analysis for TCM by use of the combined information on separation and identification produced by chromatography and spectrometry. In this study, quality control of TCM and its formula would be investigated with two-dimensional hyphenated chromatographic instruments and some chemometric multi-resolution methods.In the Introduction part, the recent development of quality control, chromatographic fingerprints, modern analytical techniques and chemometric methods with their application to TCM are summarized.Yupingfeng powder is an ancient concentrated preparation in China. This formulation is composed of three single herbs: Radix Astragali, Rhizoma Atractylodis Macrocephalae and Radix Saposhnikoviae. In Chapter Two, with the help of chemometric approaches based on two-dimensional data from GC-MS, the separation ability of GC is mathematically improved and many more chemical components could be separated and identified since overlapping peak clusters could be resolved into pure chromatograms and related mass spectra for each of the components involved. Qualitative and quantitative determination is conducted with the pure chromatograms and mass spectra obtained by use of similarity searches in the MS databases and the overall volume integration technique, respectively. Finally, the volatile components of Yupingfeng powder and the three single herbs have been compared so as to investigate their changes. In Chapter Three, water-soluble components are first detected with HPLC-DAD. With the help of some similar chemometric multi-resolution approaches such as HELP upon the two-dimensional data produced, pure chromatogram and UV spectra of each component can be obtained. With the combined information on retention times and UV spectra, chemical components in Yupingfeng powder, Radix Astragali, Rhizoma Atractylodis Macrocephalae and Radix Saposhnikoviae are qualitatively and quantitatively compared.Rhizoma asarum is an important TCM in China, in which essential oil is pharmacological active ingredient. Volatile constituents in essential oils of Rhizoma asarum from Liaoning, Gansu and Hunan in China are qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed aided by GC-MS combined with some multi-resolution techniques like HELP in Chapter Four. In comparison with the volatile constituents in essential oils of Rhizoma asarum from three producing sources, most of them can match each other. The results in this chapter will surely aid to construct the chromatographic fingerprints for the identification and quality control of Rhizoma asarum.