A fast and sensitive HPLC coupled with multivariate analysis was utilized to assist the quality assessment of Gentianae macrophyllae radix (Qinjiao). Seventy-six peaks were separated and detected on a fused-core column with 35 min. Principal component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis of the chromatographic data showed that the 17 batches of Qinjiao could be well categorized into three groups, which were closely related to the origins of them. Partial least square-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) exhibited that the quality differentiation might be explained by at least four components, in which, gentiopicroside (GE), loganic acid (LA), swertiamarin (SA) were characterized by external reference, one of them was unidentified in this work. The content levels of GE, LA and SA were more relevant to comprehensive quality of Qinjiao than the ones of shanzhiside methyl ester and sweroside was confirmed by the PLS prediction models through analyzing the relevance of the chemical profiling to the levels of them. The present study not only indicated that GE, LA, SA and one unidentified compound were the rational markers to represent the comprehensive quality of Qinjiao but also demonstrated the power of chemical profiling platform in the quality assessment of Chinese medicine herbals.
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.