Quality Evaluation of the Leaves of Dimocarpus Longan Lour. Based on HPLC Fingerprint Combined With Chemometric Analysis and Dynamic Accumulation

The leaves of Dimocarpus longan Lour. (LYY), a plant belonging to the Sapindaceae family, are a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) with Guangxi national characteristics. However, its quality standards remain inadequate, and considering the impact of the current standard harvest period on medicinal plants, it is necessary to study how different harvest periods affect the component contents of LYY. In this study, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) combined with chemometrics was employed to analyze the chemical components of LYY across various harvest periods. By comparing 12 batches of LYY fingerprints, 8 compounds were identified. The results of similarity analysis (SA), hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), principal component analysis (PCA), orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA), and weighted technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) revealed differences in LYY samples from different harvest periods, with the samples of January and February being of better quality, finding that gallic acid, quercitrin, and quercetin might be potential markers for these compositional variations. Quantitative analysis demonstrated that the contents of different compounds varied with the harvest period. In conclusion, the established method can be applied to comprehensively evaluate the LYY quality, providing a scientific basis for its reasonable harvest.