Herbal Metabolic Profiling of Raw and Steamed Panax notoginseng

Abstract
At present, metabolite profiling is of growing importance in herbal medicine fields such as breeding, formulation, quality control and clinical trials. Herbal metabolic profiling allows direct detection of down-stream derivatives of metabolites, arising from herbal formulation process, using metabolite profiling ultra performance liquid chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC/TOFMS).

This analytical approach allows the discrimination and tentative authentication of unique biomarkers related to different herbal extracts using unsupervised multivariate principal component analysis (PCA) of the UPLC/TOFMS data. The tentative identification of biomarkers is complemented significantly by the accurate mass measurement of TOFMS and the high resolution and high retention time reproducibility rendered by UPLC.

The application of this approachin herbal extract discrimination and ginsenoside biomarker discovery of raw and steamed Panax notoginseng (Burk.) F.H. Chen is demonstrated and discussed.