Flow injection mass spectroscopic fingerprinting and multivariate analysis for differentiation of three Panax species.

This study describes the use of spectral fingerprints acquired by flow injection(FI)-MS and multivariate analysis to differentiate three Panax species: P. ginseng, P. quinquefolius, and P. notoginseng. Data were acquired using both high resolution and unit resolution MS, and were processed using principal component analysis (PCA), soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), and a fuzzy rule-building expert system (FuRES). Both high and unit resolution MS allowed discrimination among the three Panax species. PLS-DA and FuRES provided classification with 100% accuracy while SIMCA provided classification accuracies of 77 and 88% by high- and low-resolution MS, respectively. The method does not quantify any of the sample components. With FI-MS, the analysis time was less than 2 min.