LAUSR

Abstract Identification of Fritillaria bulbus species was investigated by pyrolysis-gas chromatography combined with fingerprint analysis. An amount of 0.2 mg of sample powder was pyrolyzed in a vertical micro-furnace pyrolyzer at 470 °C, and the pyrolysis products were directly taken into a gas chromatography with a flame ionization detector or a mass spectrometer. A total of 15 samples from different Fritillaria bulbus species were characterized by the relative areas of 32 common peaks. The established method had a good reproducibility and the fingerprints showed a high similarity. In addition, the discrimination of Fritillaria bulbus samples from different species was performed by principal component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis on the basis of the obtained database. The results proved the Py-GC fingerprint combined with statistical approach could be a good supplementary method for the traditional morphology-based taxonomy identification.