Identification of essential components of Houttuynia cordata by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and the integrated chemometric approach.

Starting with Biller-Biemann's work [J.E. Biller, K. Biemann, Anal. Lett. 7 (1974) 515], various kinds of approaches have been proposed to extract GC/MS data to obtain pure components responses. In this paper, an integrated chemometric approach is proposed, which combine four sequential steps, data pretreatment, component perception, resolution and component identification, and then the proposed approach is manipulated to analyze the essential oils of a herbal medicine named Houttuynia cordata (HC). On the basis of the selective information obtained from both chromatograms and mass spectra, the proposed integrated chemometric approach can resolve the two-way GC/MS responses matrix into pure chromatograms and mass spectra without any model assumption on the peak shape. The resolution results obtained from HC samples demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach and indicate that it may be a promising one for analyzing complex chromatograms.