Metabolite profiling of justicia gendarussa herbal drug preparations

Abstract

Metabolite profiling can be applied as a reliable quality control (QC) tool for herbal drug preparations, especially if the specifications of the quality markers have not yet been determined. Some herbal drug preparations of Justicia gendarussa (JG), ie acidified dried crude drugs, ethanol extracts, laboratory-made granule preparations, and industrial-scale produced granules, could be clearly differentiated by using a combination of ultra-performance liquid chromatography ultra-high-resolution quadrupole-time-of-flight-mass spectrometry and multivariate analysis; unfortunately, attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform-infra-red spectroscopy could not be applied. The differences in the metabolite profiles were caused mostly by the variations in the concentrations of some fatty acid components. This work showed that classification analysis can be applied for reliable QC purposes of the J. gendarussa herbal drug preparations; the industrial-made granules of JG were located in the correct cluster of the score plot of the training set.