Establishment of Characteristic Fingerprint Chromatogram for the Identification of Chinese Herbal Medicines
SIU-KAY WONG 1*, SHU-KI TSUI1, SIK-YIU KWAN1, XIAO-LI SU2, RUI-CHAO LIN2, LI-MING TANG3 AND JIAN-XING CHEN3
1.Government Laboratory, 88 Chung Hau St., Homantin, Hong Kong SAR, China
2.National Institute for the Control of Pharmaceutical and Biological Products, Beijing 100050, China
3.Shanghai Institute for Drug Control, Shanghai 200233, China
(Received: July 30, 2003; Accepted: January 27, 2004)
ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that chromatographic fingerprint analysis has been used increasingly for the identification of Chinese herbal medicines, there is no recognized procedure for the establishment of characteristic fingerprint chromatogram. In this paper, a chromatographic response function (CRF) was introduced to quantitatively compare chromatograms obtained under different experimental conditions. As a result, the optimum experimental conditions for the establishment of characteristic fingerprint chromatogram could be identified. Moreover, since the proposed function involved data that were directly available from the workstation after each chromatographic analysis, calculation could be automated. In this paper, the function was successfully applied to obtain characteristic fingerprint chromatogram for Chinese herb Langdu.
Key words: characteristic fingerprint chromatogram, optimization, chromatographic conditions, Chinese herbal medicines, Langdu