Evaluating Paeonia Radix Alba quality by multidimensional quantified fingerprinting combined with antioxidant profiling

Abstract

Paeonia radix alba (PRA) is a traditional food-based herbal medicine with high market demand, that has resulted in the existence of counterfeit and inferior medicines, and so its quality control is always an exceptionally difficult challenge. Although many fingerprint studies on PRA have been reported, the evaluation system is not well established. In this study, a complete five-wavelength HPLC fusion fingerprint system was developed and 17 batches of PRA pieces from different origins were evaluated using the integrated linear quantitative fingerprint method (ILQFM). To avoid the limitations of a single method, a UV spectral quantum fingerprint was also employed for multidimensional quality analysis of PRA. The biological activity of PRA is discussed by combining fingerprinting with an in vitro online antioxidant system for rapid screening of antioxidant active ingredients. What's more, due to the multi-component and multi-target nature of herbal medicine, quantitative analysis of multi-components by a single marker (QAMS) was used to determine the content of paeoniflorin, pantolactone glucoside, benzoyl paeoniflorin and gallic acid. The combination of ILQFM and QAMS allows for rapid, comprehensive and accurate assessment of the quality of herbal medicines, providing a new direction for the assessment of pharmaceutical quality.