ABSTRACT
Objective: To reveal the variation regularity of chemical components in crude Cyathula officinalis and its processed products (stir-fried with yellow rice wine and salt), and promote the quality control of the herb. Methods: Agilent Zorbax Eclipse XDB-C18 column (250 mm×4.6 mm, 5 μm) was used with acetonitrile and 0.1% phosphoric acid solution in gradient elution mode. The detective wavelength was 266 nm and the flow rate was 0.5 mL/min. The fingerprints for 24 herbal samples were set up and 25 peaks were recorded with different retention time and peak areas. Three peaks were successfully identified as puerarin, cyasterone, and daidzein by comparing with the retention time of reference substances. The vectorial angle method was used to evaluate the similarity between fingerprints. The cluster analysis and principal component analysis were applied to studying the HPLC fingerprint and chemical pattern recognition. Results: The two processing techniques, stir-frying with wine and salt, both had significant effect on herbal chemical profiles. The contents of three known active components, puerarin, cyasterone, and daidzein, were not observed except a little increasing of the content of puerarin after the crude herbs were processed with salt. Conclusion: More precise active components of the processed products of C. officinalis need to future study to improve the current quality standard of C. officinalis in Chinese Pharmacopoeia. The method provided by this study is a powerful tool to identify and quality control between crude and processed C. officinalis because of its quantificational and visual evaluation system.