Jia Yusheng, Sun Mengmeng, Shi Yuhua, Zhu Zhihui, van Wijk Eduard, van Wijk Roeland, van Andel Tinde, Wang Mei
1LU-European Center for Chinese Medicine and Natural Compounds, Institute of Biology, Leiden University, Sylviusweg 72, 2333 BE Leiden, The Netherlands.
3Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, Darwinweg 2, 2333 CR Leiden, The Netherlands.
Chin Med. 2020 Jan 15;15:6. doi: 10.1186/s13020-020-0287-0. eCollection 2020.
Investigation of aged Chinese herbal materials will help us to understand their use and sources in ancient time and broaden the historical perspective of Chinese material medica. To reach this aim, the basic understanding of aged herbal materials, including physical and chemical characters, is of great importance. Delayed luminescence (DL) technique was developed as a rapid, direct, systemic, objective and sample loss-free tool to characterize the properties of Chinese herbal materials. In this study, we measured DL values in aged Chinese herbal materials that were transported from Asia to Europe during the 20th century and stored in Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the Utrecht University museum, and compared these with modern material of the same species.
A hyperbolic function was used to extract four properties from the DL curves of Chinese herbal material from 1900, the 1950s and recently harvested products. Statistical tools, including the Student's t test, One-way analysis of variance and Principal Component Analysis, were used to differentiate the DL properties of aged and contemporary collections of spp. Salisb., Roscoe, Hance and L.
Our results showed that DL properties were significantly different between historical and contemporary Chinese herbal materials. Changes in DL values were species-dependent: the effects of storage time of DL properties were specific for each species. These outcomes help us not only in the identification of historical Chinese medicine products but also provides valuable data of the effect of storage time on herbal materials.
The simple, direct, rapid, and inexpensive measurements offered by DL provide a novel tool to assess the taxonomic identity of Chinese and other herbal materials and assess the differences in chemical properties with increasing storage time. Our results contribute to the further development of novel digital tools for the quality control of herbal materials.
对陈年中药材的研究有助于我们了解其在古代的使用情况和来源，并拓宽中药的历史视野。为实现这一目标，对陈年中药材的基本了解，包括物理和化学特性，至关重要。延迟发光（DL）技术作为一种快速、直接、系统、客观且无样品损失的工具，用于表征中药材的特性。在本研究中，我们测量了20世纪从亚洲运往欧洲并保存在荷兰国家自然历史博物馆和乌得勒支大学博物馆的陈年中药材的DL值，并将其与同一物种的现代材料进行比较。
使用双曲线函数从1900年、20世纪50年代和近期收获的中药材的DL曲线中提取四个特性。使用包括学生t检验、单因素方差分析和主成分分析在内的统计工具，来区分不同年代收集的、、、和的DL特性。
我们的结果表明，历史和当代中药材的DL特性存在显著差异。DL值的变化因物种而异：DL特性的储存时间影响因物种而异。这些结果不仅有助于我们识别历史上的中药产品，还提供了储存时间对中药材影响的有价值数据。
DL提供的简单、直接、快速且廉价的测量方法，为评估中药和其他草药材料的分类身份以及评估随着储存时间增加化学性质的差异提供了一种新颖的工具。我们的结果有助于进一步开发用于草药材料质量控制的新型数字工具。
