Development of an HPLC Fingerprint for Quality Control of Genkwa flos

Abstract

Genkwa flos is a widely used herbal plant with great medical value in traditional Chinese medicine. For identification and effective quality control of Genkwa flos, a chemical pattern expressed by high performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detector (HPLC-DAD) fingerprint analysis was developed. In the present work, HPLC with gradient elution was performed on methanol extracts of 21 samples of Genkwa flos collected from different geographic locations and 16 chromatographic peaks were selected as common peaks, 10 of them were further identified by (-) electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). The established chromatographic fingerprint was analyzed with chemometric methods, including similarity evaluation and principal component analysis, to differentiate and classify the samples. The results showed this fingerprint analysis was thus a very reliable and useful method for assessment of the quality of Genkwa flos.