DART–TOF–MS based metabolomics study for the discrimination analysis of geographical origin of Angelica gigas roots collected from Korea and China

Rapid and efficient identification of the geographical origin of Angelica gigas roots (dang-gui) was performed using DART–TOF–MS (direct analysis in real time–time of flight–mass spectrometry) based metabolomics. As an ambient desorption/ionization technique, DART–TOF–MS can provide soft ionization and rapid analysis of samples with little sample preparation so it has been advantageously applied to high-throughput metabolomics analysis. In order to develop an efficient tool for discriminating, particularly geographical origin of raw herbal medicine, we employed DART–TOF–MS fingerprinting on dang-gui from Korean and Chinese markets. Principal component analysis of DART–TOF–MS fingerprints gave distinctive clustering information among two species of A. gigas and A. sinensis so that we used only A. gigas species for the sequential experiment. Orthogonal projections to latent structures-discriminant analysis of A. gigas samples revealed the separation between samples cultivated in two countries. Major discriminating components were elucidated as decursin/decursinol angelate, unidentified molecular ion of m/z 247 (protonated ions of molecular formula of C14H14O4) and another molecular ion of m/z 432. DART–TOF–MS based chemical fingerprinting with the multivariate analysis of dang-gui was shown to be efficient and accurate way to identify its geographical origin, between Korea and China.