Abstract
Background
Currently, although Inula nervosa Wall is well investigated, little is understood about blossoms of Inula nervosa Wall (BINW).
Objective
In this work, we systematically investigated the antioxidant activity of the extract from BINW by various standard assays including DPPH free radical ability, ABTS• +, and FRAP.
Methods
Chemical compounds are tentatively identified through an UHPLC-QTOF-MS system. Furthermore, the contents of nine compounds were detected with UHPLC method coupled with PDA. By carefully analyzing the quantitative data via clusters analysis and PCA.
Results
46 compounds are tentatively identified and our results showed that 9 compound samples in 21 batches of BINW collected from different areas could be differentiated and analyzed by a heatmap visualization. In addition, the contents of nine compounds (flavonoids, phenolic acids) exhibited a total of higher amounts and better antioxidant activities from Yunnan than those from other three origins.
Conclusions
Our study not only developed a powerful platform to explain the difference traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) species that in closely related through the chemometric and chemical profiling, but also presented a useful method to establish quality criteria of BINW with multiple origins.
Highlights
To detailly characterize the BINW, we not only performed DPPH, FRAP and ABTS assays to investigate its antioxidant activity, but also established UHPLC-QTOF-MS/MS and UHPLC-PDA based methods to comprehensively identify and qualitatively analyze its components.
Quality assessment and antioxidant activities of the blossoms of Inula nervosa Wall