Zhang Guoqin, Li Huanhuan, Sun Lili, Liu Yi, Cao Ying, Ren Xiaoliang, Liu Yanan
School of Chinese Materia Medica, Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, No. 10, Poyang Lake Road, Tuanbo New City West District, Jinghai District, Tianjin 301617, China.
J Chromatogr Sci. 2023 Feb 3;61(2):110-118. doi: 10.1093/chromsci/bmac026.
Bitter almond is a well-known and commonly used traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for relieving coughs and asthma. However, the bioactive chemical composition of bitter almonds, especially their amygdalin content, which determines their quality for TCM use, is variable and this can cause problems with formulating and prescribing TCMs based on bitter almonds. Therefore, a simple method was developed to evaluate the compositional quality of bitter almonds from their appearance traits, based on a combination of chromatographic fingerprinting and chemometrics. Bitter almonds were analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and principal components analysis (PCA) were applied to classify bitter almonds, which split the samples into two independent clusters. Three chemical markers (amygdalin, prunasin, and one unidentified component) were found by partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). What's more, a new PLS-DA model was reconstructed to confirm the obtained chemical markers from PLS-DA. Additionally, the appearance trait indices and amygdalin content of bitter almond were determined and the classification was confirmed by one-way analysis of variance. This method can easily determine the quality of bitter almonds from their appearance alone, high quality correlated closely with kernels that were larger, oblong in shape and heavier.
苦杏仁是一种广为人知且常用的止咳平喘中药。然而，苦杏仁的生物活性化学成分，尤其是决定其药用品质的苦杏仁苷含量存在差异，这可能会给基于苦杏仁的中药配方和用药带来问题。因此，基于色谱指纹图谱和化学计量学相结合的方法，开发了一种从外观特征评估苦杏仁成分质量的简单方法。采用高效液相色谱法（HPLC）分析苦杏仁。应用层次聚类分析（HCA）和主成分分析（PCA）对苦杏仁进行分类，将样本分为两个独立的聚类。通过偏最小二乘判别分析（PLS-DA）发现了三种化学标志物（苦杏仁苷、樱叶苷和一种未鉴定成分）。此外，重建了一个新的PLS-DA模型以确认从PLS-DA中获得的化学标志物。此外，测定了苦杏仁的外观性状指标和苦杏仁苷含量，并通过单因素方差分析确认了分类。该方法仅通过外观就能轻松确定苦杏仁的质量，高质量的苦杏仁与更大、呈椭圆形且更重的果仁密切相关。
