Quality Control of Fingerprint of Radix Astragali by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography Coupled with Chemometric Methods

High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was employed in a fingerprint analysis of Radix astragali. A characteristic HPLC profile of known Radix astragali samples collected from five primary habitats in China was established by evaluating 15 samples with chemometric methods, including similarity evaluation, hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), principal component analysis (PCA) and discriminant analysis (DA). The feasibility and advantages of employing chromatographic fingerprinting combined with chemometric methods were investigated and demonstrated in the evaluation of Radix astragali for the first time. The results showed that the chromatographic fingerprint combined with chemometric methods could efficiently distinguish Radix astragali from various areas and provide quality control in the quantitative analysis.