One single standard substance for the simultaneous determination of 17 triterpenes in Ganoderma lingzhi and its related species using high-performance liquid chromatography

•SSDMC was set up and seventeen medium and weak polar triterpenes of Ganoderma were determined by ganoderic acid A.•The core-shell chromatography column was applied to HPLC.•Hierarchical cluster analysis of Ganoderma was performed successfully by quantitative determination of triterpenes.

Due to the difficulty and high cost for the preparation of triterpenes, one single standard for the simultaneous determination of multi-components (SSDMC) with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is an advanced solution for multi-component analysis. Experiments were carried out to investigate the feasibility of SSDMC for the analysis of Ganoderma triterpenes, with external standard method (ESM) compared, and the samples of Ganoderma were classified by the content of Ganoderma triterpenes. The analysis was performed by using a Fortis Speed Core-C18 column (150 mm × 4.6 mm I.D., 2.6 μm) at gradient elution of 0.01% glacial acetic acid-water (V/V) and acetonitrile with diode array detection (252 nm), at a flow rate of 1 mL/min. The results showed that all calibration curves had good linearity (r2 > 0.9999) within test ranges. The LOD and LOQ were lower than 2.52 ng and 6.43 ng, respectively. The RSD for intra-day and inter-day of the seventeen analytes were less than 3.12% at three levels, and the recoveries were 91.4-103.0%. The contents of other 16 triterpenes were determined with ganoderic acid A by SSDMC, which showed that there were few differences compared with the results obtained by ESM. Moreover, the classification of 25 different species and strains of Ganoderma by using the content of triterpenes intuitively reflected the distinction among Ganoderma. In summary, the developed method could be readily utilized as a method of quality evaluation for Ganoderma triterpenes.