BINARY DETECTOR FINGERPRINTS ANALYSIS OF ZIZIPHUS JUJUBA AND ZIZIPHUS JUJUBA VAR. SPINOSA BY HPLC-DAD-ELSD COUPLED WITH CHEMOMETRIC METHOD

Abstract

To discriminate the fruits of Ziziphus jujuba and Z. jujuba var. spinosa, a binary detector fingerprint was proposed and validated by utilizing HPLC coupled with two detection techniques of diode assay detection (DAD) and evaporative light scattering detection (ELSD). Using the data fusion method, the two sets of chromatographic data were combined to a fusion data set of fingerprints, which was further analyzed with chemometric methods of hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) and principal component analysis (PCA). The results showed that the presented fingerprint obtained on DAD and ELSD could better represent the chemical characteristics of the jujube samples than that obtained at a single detector. With the aid of chemometric methods, this validated binary detector fingerprints method could be used as a powerful approach for discrimination of Z. jujuba and Z. jujuba var. spinosa. Furthermore, from the results of PCA, it was found that the main differences between the fruits of Z. jujuba and Z. jujuba var. spinosa were the content variances of the flavonoids and ursane-type triterpenic acids, so these compounds were promising to be selected as the markers for distinguishing these jujube fruits.

Keywords:

• binary detector fingerprints
• chemometrics
• HPLC-DAD-ELSD
• triterpenic acid
• Ziziphus jujuba
• Ziziphus jujuba var. spinosa

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30672678), the project of Chinese Pharmacopoeia Committee (YD-025), the 2009 Program for New Century Excellent Talents by the Ministry of Education (NCET-09-0163), and 2009 Program for Excellent Scientific and Technological Innovation Team of Jiangsu Higher Education, Construction Project for Jiangsu Key Laboratory for High Technology Research of TCM Formulae (BM2010576). We are grateful to Mr. Decang Kong (Cangxian, Hebei Province, China) and M. D. Pengfei Hou for collecting samples. We are also pleased to thank Waters China Ltd. for technical support.