Prediction of Total Phenolic Content in Extracts of Prunella Species from HPLC Profiles by Multivariate Calibration

Abstract

The multivariate calibration methods—principal component regression (PCR) and partial least squares (PLSs)—were employed for the prediction of total phenol contents of four Prunella species. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and spectrophotometric approaches were used to determine the total phenol content of the Prunella samples. Several preprocessing techniques such as smoothing, normalization, and column centering were employed to extract the chemically relevant information from the data after alignment with correlation optimized warping (COW). The importance of the preprocessing was investigated by calculating the root mean square error (RMSE) for the calibration set of the total phenol content of Prunella samples. The models developed based on the preprocessed data were able to predict the total phenol content with a precision comparable to that of the reference of the Folin-Ciocalteu method. PLS model seems preferable, because of its predictive and describing abilities and good interpretability of the contribution of compounds to the total phenol content. Multivariate calibration methods were constructed to model the total phenol content of the Prunella samples from the HPLC profiles and indicate peaks responsible for the total phenol content successfully.