Metabolomic quality control of commercial Asian ginseng, and cultivated and wild American ginseng using 1H NMR and multi-step PCA

• A multi-step region-excision PCA was used on NMR spectra of commercial ginseng.
• New metabolites were identified to distinguish Asian ginseng from American ginseng.
• For the first time, wild American ginseng was analyzed using NMR-PCA.
• Ginsenosides content of wild ginseng was shown to be twice as the cultivated ones.

Ginseng, mainly Asian ginseng and American ginseng, is the most widely consumed herbal product in the world [1]. However, the existing quality control method is not adequate: adulteration is often seen in the market. In this study, 31 batches of ginseng from Chinese stores were analyzed using 1H NMR metabolite profiles together with multi-step principal component analysis. The most abundant metabolites, sugars, were excluded from the NMR spectra after the first principal component analysis, in order to reveal differences contributed by less abundant metabolites. For the first time, robust, distinctive and representative differences of Asian ginseng from American ginseng were found and the key metabolites responsible were identified as sucrose, glucose, arginine, choline, and 2-oxoglutarate and malate. Differences between wild and cultivated ginseng were identified as ginsenosides. A substitute cultivated American ginseng was noticed. These results demonstrated that the combination of 1H NMR and PCA is effective in quality control of ginseng.

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