Correlation between epicarp spots and the overall quality of Forsythiae Fructus

ABSTRACT

Forsythiae Fructus (FF, Lianqiao in Chinese) is the dried fruit of Forsythia suspensa (Thunb.) Vahl. As one of the commonly used bulk medicinal materials, FF has been used as a heat-clearing and detoxifying traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of infectious diseases. Epicarp spots are inherent traits of the FF. Previous reports have suggested that it might be related to the quality of FF, while the accurate correlation between them remains ambiguous. In this study, 32 groups of FF were selected from the same batch, and the information of epicarp spots was converted into spot area index (SAI). Then, the overall quality of FF was evaluated by principal component analysis (PCA) based on the content of 21 major bioactive ingredients. Subsequently, the Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to explore the correlation between SAI and the overall quality of FF. Ingredients related to SAI were identified. The results indicated that a significant negative correlation was shown between the SAI and the overall quality of FF. Six bioactive ingredients, including forsythoside B, p-coumaric acid, galuteolin, hesperidin, baicalin and kaempferol, were negatively correlated with SAI. This research will provide scientific information on the relationship between epicarp spots and the overall quality of FF and facilitate the general quality assessment of FF in a rapid and convenient way.

KEYWORDS:

• Forsythiae Fructus
• epicarp spots
• overall quality
• correlation analysis
• bioactive ingredients

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the General Project of Natural Science Research in Universities of Jiangsu Province (20KJD360001).

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1016/S1875-5364(10)60021-0

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contributions

Conceptualization, Xunhong Liu, Lifang Wei and Cuihua Chen; data curation, Jiali Chen, Yuqi Mei, Zhichen Cai and Shengxin Yin; formal analysis, Shengxin Yin, Lisi Zou, Jiali Chen, Mengxia Tan and Zhichen Cai; writing – original draft preparation, Lifang Wei, Jianming Cheng, Cuihua Chen and Xunhong Liu; writing – review and editing, Xunhong Liu, Lifang Wei, Cuihua Chen, Jianming Cheng, Yuqi Mei, Jiali Chen, Mengxia Tan and Zhichen Cai; funding acquisition, Xunhong Liu and Cuihua Chen. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the the General Project of Natural Science Research in Universities of Jiangsu Province [20KJD360001].