A quality evaluation strategy for Rhizoma coptidis from a variety of different sources using chromatographic fingerprinting combined with biological fingerprinting

Most of herbal medicines of different sources are used for the same treatment goal in clinic despite their tremendous differences of the quality. Because the clinical efficacy is closely related to the quality of medicines, the implementation of an effective quality control (QC) process is vital. Chemical methods based on content determination and chromatographic fingerprints (CFs) have been recommended as powerful tools. In spite of advances in QC, it is still difficult to determine that which of the chemical compositions can best reflect the correlation with the desired biological activity. Herein, we have focused on the biological activities of multi-source herbal medicines to establish an analytical method. By looking for correlations between the biological activities and their chemical compositions, the method can identify reasonable chemical indicators or chemical methods with biological activity information. In this study, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and microcalorimetry are combined as a useful method for evaluating the quality of Rhizoma coptidis from different sources. The results of biological fingerprints (BFs) showed that the antibacterial activity sequence of R. coptidis of different sources was Coptis teeta Wall. (CT)> Coptis chinensis Franch. (CC)> Coptis deltoidea C.Y. Cheng et Hsiao (CD). The spectrum-activity relationships between CFs and BFs were investigated using the canonical correlation analysis (CCA). Compared with the CCA result of CFs and BFs, the canonical correlation coefficient r (1) and r (2) were 0.9974 and 0.9752, respectively. It revealed that there are a close correlation between the spectrum-activity relationships and several of the major anti-bacterial components in the CFs, including jatrorrhizine, coptisine, palmatine, and berberine. Of course, R. coptidis was only a representative of multi-source medical plants. The result of the current study will provide an effective reference for evaluating the quality of multi-source herbal medicines.