Discrimination of Acori Tatarinowii Rhizoma from two habitats based on GC-MS fingerprinting and LASSO-PLS-DA

This study is intended to explore the chemical differences of Acori Tatarinowii Rhizoma (ATR) samples collected from two habitats, Sichuan and Anhui provinces, China. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was applied to establishing the quantitative chemical fingerprints of ATRs. A total of 104 volatile compounds were identified and quantified with the information of mass spectra and retention index (RI). Furthermore, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), a sparse regularization method, combined with subsampling was employed to improve the classification ability of partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). After variable selection by LASSO, three chemical markers, beta-elemene, alpha-selinene and alpha-asarone, were identified for the discrimination of ATRs from two habitats, and the total classification correct rate was increased from 82.76% to 96.55%. The proposed LASSO-PLS-DA method can serve as an efficient strategy for screening marked chemical components and geo-herbalism research of traditional Chinese medicines.