There are two source
plants for the
traditional Chinese medicine Murrayae Folium et Cacumen (MFC) in
Chinese Pharmacopoeia, i.e.
Murraya exotica L. and M. paniculata (L.) Jack. Herein, a chemical comparison of M. exotica and M. paniculata by
high performance liquid chromatography (
HPLC)
fingerprint analysis coupled with
chemometrics and
network pharmacology was performed. The main peaks in the
fingerprints were identified by
liquid chromatography coupled with ion trap/
time-of-flight
mass spectrometry (LC-IT-TOF-MS) and authenticated by references. The
chemometrics results showed that the
HPLC fingerprints of these two species were clearly divided into two categories using hierarchical
cluster analysis (HCA) and
principal component analysis (
PCA), and a total of 13 significantly differentiated markers were screened out by orthogonal partial
least squares-
discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA). However, the following
network pharmacology analysis showed that these discriminated markers were found to act via many common targets and
metabolic pathways, indicating the possibly
similar pharmacological effects and mechanisms for M. exotica and M. paniculata. The above results provide valuable evidence for the equivalent use of these two
plants in clinical settings. Moreover, the chromatographic
fingerprint analysis coupled with
chemometrics and
network pharmacology supplies an efficient approach for the comparative
analysis of multi-source TCMs like MFC.