molecules Article Discrimination of the Geographical Origin of the Lateral Roots of Aconitum carmichaelii Using the Fingerprint, Multicomponent Quantification, and Chemometric Methods 1,2,3, 1,2,3, 1,2, 1,2,3 Lu-Lin Miao y , Qin-Mei Zhou y, Cheng Peng *, Chun-Wang Meng , Xiao-Ya Wang 1,2,3 and Liang Xiong 1,2,3,* 1 School of Pharmacy, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu 611137, China;
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[email protected] (X.-Y.W.) 2 State Key Laboratory Breeding Base of Systematic Research, Development and Utilization of Chinese Medicine Resources, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu 611137, China 3 Institute of Innovative Medicine Ingredients of Southwest Specialty Medicinal Materials, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu 611137, China * Correspondence:
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[email protected] (L.X.); Tel.: +86-028-6180-0018 (C.P.); +86-028-6180-0231 (L.X.) These authors contributed equally to this work. y Received: 16 October 2019; Accepted: 12 November 2019; Published: 14 November 2019 Abstract: Fuzi is a well-known traditional Chinese medicine developed from the lateral roots of Aconitum carmichaelii Debx. It is rich in alkaloids that display a wide variety of bioactivities, and it has a strong cardiotoxicity and neurotoxicity. In order to discriminate the geographical origin and evaluate the quality of this medicine, a method based on high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was developed for multicomponent quantification and chemical fingerprint analysis. The measured results of 32 batches of Fuzi from three different regions were evaluated by chemometric analysis, including similarity analysis (SA), hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), principal component analysis (PCA), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA).