RESUMO
A chemical fingerprint is an important mean for quality control of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM); however, there is much redundant information in a conventional fingerprint that can affect its availability and accuracy. In this work, the antibacterial biopotency of Scutellariae Radix (Huangqin, HQ) was determined according to the parallel line method of quantitative response. HPLC was adopted to detect the chemical fingerprint of HQ; Grey relational analysis (GRA) was used to identify the primary effective components. The results showed that the antibacterial biopotency of 15 batches of HQ ranged from 0 to 1 000 U·g-1 and the average potency was 556.29 ± 258.57 U·g-1 (1 U is equivalent to the bacteriostatic activity of 2.25 μg gentamicin). There were 34 characteristic peaks in the fingerprints of the samples and their similarities were 0.255-0.991. Eight components (P33, P30/baicalein, P19/baicalin, P15, P29, P34, P31/wogonin and P28) are positively related to antibacterial biopotency and selected from the top ten components of the grey correlation sequence to define the antibacterially effective components fingerprint of HQ. This fingerprint can clearly distinguish the commodity specification and grade, and can also characterize the morphology, components and the bacteriostatic potency differences of HQ. In summary, we established an antibacterially effective components fingerprint which provides simplified information on the antibacterial activity of Scutellariae Radix and could significantly improve the efficacy, specificity, and discriminative ability of the fingerprint for HQ, and could be a useful reference for the comprehensive quality evaluation of other TCM.