Abstract
To ensure the highest quality of Oviductus Ranae products for consumers, an accurate, efficient, scientific and comprehensive evaluation method for assessing the quality of Oviductus Ranae was proposed in this paper. The fingerprint of Oviductus Ranae has been established based on the method of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Oviductus Ranae from different habitats were analyzed by hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). The HPLC profiles of fourteen batches of Oviductus Ranae showed 33 well-resolved common peaks in each chromatogram. Five of these were assigned to 1-methyl hydantoin, 7-ketocholesterol, 4-cholesten-3-one, cholesterol and stigmasterol. Contents of these five main effective components were determined in the meantime. Based on the HPLC profiles of all the samples, the reference HPLC fingerprint and similarity values were calculated by statistical software (SPSS 19.0). It was found that similarity value of all Oviductus Ranae samples were more than 0.85 and Oviductus Ranae from same habitats had similarity to some degree. In conclusion, the proposed method had good specificity, repeatability, stability and precision, which can provide a reference for the quality evaluation and identification of the medicine origin of Oviductus Ranae. Quantitation of effective components revealed that contents of five effective constituents in Oviductus Ranae obtained from Ji Lin province were the highest, followed by Hei Longjiang province and Liaoning province. The results of HCA showed that samples classified into one group were associated with their habitats. HPLC fingerprint combined with quantitation of main effective compounds and data analysis techniques can be an efficient and useful method for monitoring the quality of Oviductus Ranae.