Quality and antioxidant activity evaluation of dandelion by HPLC with five-wavelength fusion fingerprint

Abstract

Taraxacum officinale (dandelion), a common herbal medicine, is widely used in medical and food fields. However, most reports about the quality control (QC) of dandelion are single, they focus on the qualitative or quantitative aspect only. Therefore, the study aimed to evaluate the quality consistency of dandelion from both qualitative and quantitative aspects and to explore potential antioxidant components in combination with five-wavelength fusion fingerprint. At first, 18 batches of samples were separated and identified using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Additionally, a five-wavelength fusion fingerprint was performed to avoid the one-sidedness of a single wavelength. The similarity analysis of fingerprint was performed by an equal weight ratio quantitative fingerprint method, which was proved to be a comprehensive method for further discrimination and holistic quality evaluation of dandelion. Furthermore, the in vitro antioxidant activity was studied, OPLS models were obtained for the analysis of fingerprint-efficacy relationships, which offered significant medicinal efficacy information for quality control. The results illustrated that the overall and inner quality information of dandelion can be found by the novel method, which provides a reliable and comprehensive reference for the quality assessment of dandelion and any other herbal medicines.