Geographical origin traceability of medicine food homology species based on an extract-and-shoot inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry method and chemometrics

In this work, an extract-and-shoot sample preparation method based on inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was proposed for fast and efficient geographical origin traceability of medicine food homology species (MFHs). It was not essential to know the absolute contents of mineral elements in MFHs. Exploratory analysis of the MFHs samples was executed by the principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). The mass spectrometry relative intensities of 46 mineral elements in combination with partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) to classify-three MFHs, which were Atractylodis macrocephalae Rhizoma (AMR), Lilii Bulbus (LB), and adlay (AD). Overall, the supervised PLS-DA achieved satisfactory classification results. In addition, variable importance in projection (VIP) was employed to select the main classification indicators. In brief, the proposed method was simple, rapid, environmental, and reliable because it does not require standard solutions of mineral elements and complicated pretreatment, is less time-consuming, and acquires satisfactory results.