Quality Control Methodology and Their Application in Analysis on HPLC Fingerprint Spectra of Herbal Medicines

Abstract

As traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is gradually accepted by many countries, people pay much attention to the quality of herbal medicines. Because of the significant variation in active components in them, the quality control of herbal medicines is a very important issue. Nowadays, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) fingerprint spectra (FPS) are widely used in identification and quality control of herbal medicines. This paper will analyze the methodology and their application in identifying and evaluating herbal medicines by means of HPLC FPS, which includes simple comparing, clustering, principal component analysis (PCA), and similarity analysis methods.