PMP-HPLC Fingerprint of Partial Acid Hydrolysate of Lycium barbarum Polysaccharides Based on the Chemometric Methods

In this paper, the fingerprints of partial acid hydrolysates of Lycium barbarum polysaccharides (LBPs) were constructed, combined with a variety of chemometric methods, to evaluate the differences of LBPs from different origins and identify the authenticity of commercial samples. Sixteen batches of Lycium barbarum polysaccharides (LBPs) from different areas were obtained by the method of water extraction and alcohol precipitation, which were partially hydrolyzed by trifluoroacetic acid. The PMP pre-column derivatization-HPLC method was applied to analyse the monosaccharides and oligosaccharides in the partial hydrolysates of LBPs. The similarity of samples of different origins was calculated by the “similarity Evaluation System for Chromatographic Fingerprint of Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM)”software. And the fingerprints were further evaluated by chemometric methods including cluster analysis (HCA), principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). The results showed that the partial acid hydrolysis products of LBPs contained seven monosaccharides, galacturonic acid glycans of DP 2~4 and three kinds of disaccharides. The similarities of 16 batches of LBPs of different origins were high ranging from 0.911 to 0.997. HCA, PCA and PLS-DA all divided LBPs from different origins into three categories, and the classification results had certain correlation with the origins. The three iconic components that influenced the differences between origins were screened out by PLS-DA, which were glucose (Glc), arabinose (Ara) and galactose (Gal), respectively. The established fingerprint in this paper could be used for the quality control of LBPs.