Chromatographic fingerprint combined with content of asperosaponin VI and antioxidant activity for quality evaluation of wine-fried Dipsaci Radix.

Dipsaci Radix, the dry root of Dipsacusasper Wall. ex Henry, is a commonly used traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). A novel comprehensive method was proposed for quality evaluation of wine-fried Dipsaci Radix by an integrated data including three aspects of information: high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) fingerprint, asperosaponin VI content and antioxidant activity (AA). Various indicators including fingerprint similarity, asperosaponin VI content and AA were respectively employed for quality assessment of processed Dipsaci Radix samples. Results showed that considerable differences existed in quality of processed samples with different processing conditions according to three indicators. Among the factors affecting quality of wine-fried Dipsaci Radix, heating temperature was the most influential factor based on analysis of variance (ANOVA), and should be cautiously controlled. The three evaluation indicators respectively used for optimization of processing technology suggested different optimal conditions of wine-frying. Therefore, a combined indicator based on three evaluation indicators was used for determination of optimal processing condition. Multivariate statistical methods such as Hierarchical Clustering Analysis (HCA) and Principal Components Analysis (PCA) were both employed to classify the processed samples for quality evaluation. To more comprehensively evaluate the quality of wine-fried Dipsaci Radix, HPLC fingerprint combined with content of asperosaponin VI and AA may be a reasonable and practical approach.