Quality Evaluation of Sichuan Ophiopogon Japonicus Based on Nuclear Magnetic Fingerprints and Chemometrics Methods

By comparing the nuclear magnetic fingerprint of Sichuan Ophiopogon japonicus in Mianyang, Dazhou, and Guang’an regions, four chemometrics methods, including similarity analysis, cluster analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), were used to analyze the characteristics of the nuclear magnetic fingerprints of samples and identify the regions. The total flavonoids and total saponins were compared quantitatively by nuclear magnetic integration. As shown by the results, there were significant differences in the samples of Sichuan Ophiopogon japonicus from different regions, and there were also certain differences between samples from different small regions within the same large region. The consistency of the results of similarity analysis, cluster analysis, PCA, and PLS-DA indicated that the combination of nuclear magnetic fingerprints and chemometrics methods could be used for identifying regions. It was shown by the relative quantitative results that the total saponin and total flavonoid contents of the marker compounds of Ophiopogon japonicus in the Mianyang region were significantly higher than those in other regions (P<0.05).