Original Article
Comparative quality of the forms of decoction pieces evaluated by multidimensional chemical analysis and chemometrics: Poria cocos, a pilot study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfda.2019.03.002Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Eight different specifications of Poria cocos decoction pieces were investigated.

  • UHPLC-PDA-QTOF-MS/MS and QqQ-MS/MS were used for assessing the available quality.

  • Chemometric analyses were applied to comprehensively analyze the data.

  • 14 indicators were found as discriminating elements of different specifications.

  • The good forms/specifications of the decoction pieces were proposed chemically.

Abstract

Many Chinese medicinal materials (CMMs) are parts of plants or fungi that have been processed into different physical forms, termed decoction pieces, that are typically boiled in water for consumption. One CMM may have several decoction pieces forms, e.g., slices, small cubes (dice), or grains. The specifications that have different morphological parameters (shape, size and thickness) for these various decoction pieces have been developed over, in some cases, centuries of practice. Nevertheless, whether and how the form of decoction pieces affects the extraction (decoction) dynamics, and quality stability during storage has not been studied. Here, we investigated Poria cocos (PC) as a pilot study; we explore how the form of PC decoction pieces affects its chemistry using multidimensional chemical evaluation such as ultra-performance liquid chromatography-photodiode array-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-PDA-QTOF-MS/MS), ultra-performance liquid chromatography-triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QqQ-MS/MS) and high performance gel permeation chromatography coupled with charged aerosol detector (HPGPC-CAD), combined with analysis of variance (ANOVA), principal component analysis (PCA), factor analysis (FA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). The results indicated that different specifications had significant differences, and these specifications could be divided into four groups. The comprehensive results of the chemical analyses undertaken here indicate that the highest potentially available quality of PC decoction pieces was in the forms of curl, ultra-small grains and small grains, followed by thin slices. This information not only is conducive to promoting the standardization of the specification/form of PC decoction pieces and maximizing the benefits from its utilization, but also provide a promising strategy for assessing other CMM decoction pieces in different forms.

Keywords

Chemometric analyses
Forms
Multidimensional chemical evaluation
Poria cocos decoction pieces

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