ABSTRACT
At present, fingerprint has become an effective mean recognized internationally in controlling the quality of Chinese materia medica (CMM) or natural products. In recent years, there are some exploratory studies on the fingerprint of natural product, while only the injection of CMM has taken the fingerprint as one of the quality criteria. Other fingerprint studies on natural products were all staying in the researching phase. There are many reasons for the bottleneck of natural product fingerprint research, such as the component complexity of natural product. There are always a lot of impurity peaks in the analytic result of fingerprint, while it is very difficult to dissociate these impurity peaks by forthcoming analytic methods. Therefore we propose to construct the "interval fingerprint". The studies and analyses on the construction program, approach, model, and application problem of the "interval fingerprint" have been carried out with Shen'an Granule as the example.