Metabolic discrimination of sea buckthorn from different Hippophae species by 1H NMR based metabolomics

Sea buckthorn (Hippophae; Elaeagnaceae) berries are widely consumed in traditional folk medicines, nutraceuticals, and as a source of food. The growing demand of sea buckthorn berries and morphological similarity of Hippophae species leads to confusions, which might cause misidentification of plants used in natural products. Detailed information and comparison of the complete set of metabolites of different Hippopha parts per thousand species are critical for their objective identification and quality control. Herein, the variation among seven species and seven subspecies of Hippopha parts per thousand was studied using proton nuclear magnetic resonance (H-1 NMR) metabolomics combined with multivariate data analysis, and the important metabolites were quantified by quantitative H-1 NMR (qNMR) method. The results showed that different Hippophae species can be clearly discriminated and the important interspecific discriminators, including organic acids, L-quebrachitol, and carbohydrates were identified. Statistical differences were found among most of the Hippophae species and subspecies at the content levels of the aforementioned interspecific discriminators via qNMR and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test. These findings demonstrated that H-1 NMR-based metabolomics is an applicable and effective approach for simultaneous metabolic profiling, species differentiation and quality assessment.