Study on the Gas Chromatographic Fingerprints and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis for Chrysanthemum

Twelve samples of chrysanthemum grown in 4 different areas in China were collected and sampled as described, and analyzed by HS-SPME-GC under the optimum conditions (temperature and time of extraction: 80 ℃ and 30 min; 65 μm PDMS/DVB microextractor was selected for extraction) to obtain the chromatogram of their volatile components. Among the 50 peaks found, 22 common peaks were selected and the peak (No. 9) with retention time of 25.57 min was selected as the reference peak. Values of α and S were calculated on the base of peak areas according to the technical specification, and the fingerprints of the 12 chrysanthemum samples were established. Mass spectroscopy was applied to characterize the volatile components in the chrysanthemum samples by referring to the NIST 08 spectrographic data base and related literatures. Furthermore, hierachical cluster analysis was applied with the aid of the software of SPSS 16.0 to have the fingerprints studied comparatively and classified. By applying the proposed method to analyze 2 unknown chrysanthemum samples, growing areas of the samples were identified and their quality were evaluated.