Application of mid-infared spectroscopy with multivariate analysis for the discrimination of toxic plant, Gelsemium elegans

Abstract Gelsemium elegans is a commonly used herb to treat different kinds of diseases. However, the indole alkaloid present in the plant might cause serious side effects. In this research, the infrared spectroscopic identification approach including Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), Second derivative infrared spectra (SD-IR) and two-dimensional correlation infrared spectra (2D-IR) was used to develop a simple and rapid method to discriminate the stem, leaf and root of the Gelsemium elegans plant. This is because the stem, leaf and root contained different amount of indole alkaloid that contributed to the toxicity. Through this study, all the three parts were successfully identified and discriminated through the infrared spectroscopic identification method. The identification approach was also validated by comparing the samples of the mixture of both stem and root (SR) to the stem and root, respectively and also by comparing different plants with Gelsemium elegans plant. Besides that, all the samples of different parts of the Gelsemium elegans were analyzed with the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Soft Independent Modelling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) pattern recognition technique to test and verify the experimental results. The SIMCA model was validated by comparing 70 standard herbs to the model. From the results, macroscopic IR fingerprint method and the classification analysis successfully discriminate not only between Gelsemium elegans samples and standard herbs but also successfully distinguished the three different parts of Gelsemium elegans plant.