Chemical Fingerprinting of Paeonia lactiflora and Paeonia veitchii by HPLC

Paeonia lactiflora Pall. and Paeonia veitchii Lynch belong to the Ranunculaceae family and both their roots are used as traditional Chinese medicine, named Chishao recorded in Chinese pharmacopoeia [1]. Chinese use these plants for the treatment of epistaxis, inflammation of the eye, chest pain, amenorrhea, dysmenorrheal, mass formation in the abdomen, as well as other indications [2–4]. P. lactiflora has been well studied but little is known about the phytochemistry of P. veitchii [5–7]. The aim of this study is to compare the chemical fingerprints of P. lactiflora and P. veitchii by HPLC and to present a practical method to identify these two species. Twenty one P. lactiflora collections and fifteen P. veitchii collections from different sites were analyzed by HPLC. The analysis method was certified by validation study. The HPLC fingerprints obtained from all the samples were compared by the software of chromatography fingerprint similarity evaluation system provided by The Pharmacopoeia Commission of P. R. China. The analysis results showed that the HPLC fingerprints detected from twenty one P. lactiflora collections differ from the HPLC fingerprints detected from fifteen P. veitchii collections. The similarity is from 0.687 to 0.799 between these two species, but the similarity is from 0.914 to 0.993 among the same species. Therefore, this report presents a practical, rapid and reliable HPLC-method, which allows the identification of P. lactiflora and P. veitchii by fingerprint profiles.

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