Rapid Determination of Amino Acids in Ginseng by High Performance Liquid Chromatography and Chemometric Resolution

Ginseng is one of the most important traditional Chinese medicines and functional foods. A method for the fast determination of amino acids in ginseng samples using high performance liquid chromatography(HPLC) was developed, in which strong isocratic elution was employed for simplifying the separation and speeding up the analysis. All amino acids were eluted within 3 min with the chromatogram composed of overlapped peaks from the interferences. Then, non-negative immune algorithm(NNIA) was adopted to resolve the chromatographic signals of the components from the chromatogram measured. The results show that the signals of the amino acids can be correctly extracted by NNIA and the signal extracted can be used for the quantitative analysis. The method was validated via determining six amino acids of four different samples of ginseng. The recoveries of the spiked samples are in a range of 96.6%–106.3%.