Application of near infrared spectroscopy for the rapid determination of epimedin A, B, C and icariin in Epimedium

Abstract

A method for rapid quantitative analysis of epimedin A, B, C and icariin in Epimedium was developed based on Fourier transform near infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy, and by adopting high performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLC-DAD) as the reference method. Multivariate calibrations models were built by partial least squares regression (PLSR) based on the full absorbance spectra (10 000–4000 cm⁻¹) or only the most informative key variables selected by the competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) method. In comparison, the accuracy of the CARS-PLSR method was apparently higher than full spectrum-PLSR for four kinds of investigated flavonoids. For CARS-PLSR, the coefficients of determination (R²) for prediction were 0.8969, 0.8810, 0.9273 and 0.9325 and the root mean square errors of prediction (RMSEP) were 0.1789, 0.2572, 1.2872 and 0.3615 for epimedin A, B, C and icariin, respectively. The good performance indicates that the combination of NIR spectroscopy with CARS-PLSR is an effective method for determination of epimedin A, B, C and icariin in Epimedium with fast, economic and nondestructive advantages compared to traditional chemical methods.