Chemical Fingerprint of Dachaihu Granule and Its Chemical Correlation Between Raw Herbs

To develop a method to overall evaluate the quality of Dachaihu Granule (DCHG), high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with diode array detector was used to establish chemical fingerprint of DCHG. The correlation between the formula and its raw herbs was also evaluated. According to the retention time of standard components, chemical fingerprint of DCHG was developed and a total of 21 constituents were characterized. The separation was performed on a Kromasil C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm i.d. with 5.0 μm particle size) with a linear gradient elution of acetonitrile and water with 0.05% phosphoric acid. Precision, stability and repeatability of the method were validated. The developed method was subsequently applied to evaluate 15 batches of DCHG using similarity analysis, principal component analysis and partial least squares discriminate analysis.