Discrimination of different genera Astragalus samples via quantitative symmetry analysis of two-dimensional hetero correlation spectra.
It has been proved to be a very useful method to distinguish similar samples by two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy when they are hardly distinguished by the conventional one-dimensional spectroscopy. To acquire the quantitative description of the differences between samples, the similarity of the series dynamic spectra, which reflects the similarity of the samples themselves if obtained under the same perturbation condition, is evaluated by the symmetry of hetero 2DCOS map. Two parameters, the Euclidian distance and correlation coefficient between the upper left and lower right triangular parts of a hetero 2DCOS map, are introduced for the quantitative measure of the symmetry, which in turn characterizes the similarity of the responses of samples to a given perturbation. The above method is used to discriminate one genus of Astragalus from the others to ensure the medicinal efficacy and safety of the herb. Hypothesis tests show that the inter-distances between samples from different genera are significantly larger than the intra-ones within the same genera, while the inter-correlation coefficients are smaller than the intra-ones. The excellent result of the identification for all samples carried out by a t-test based on the distances indicates that this method provides an efficient technique for the quantitative evaluation of similarity between samples.