Comparative Study of Rice Wine-Processed and Unprocessed Angelica sinensis by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry (HPLC-MS) and Chemometrics.

As a common pharmaceutical plant, Angelica sinensis (called Danggui (DG) in Chinese) is widely used in food, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics and frequently processed with rice wine. Eight batches of rice wine-processed (WDG) samples and unprocessed DG were prepared to compare the chemical component differences. High-performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HPLC-Q-TOF-MS) was combined with a molecular network strategy. The 140 components were identified, thereby providing a comprehensive characterization of DG and WDG. Chemometrics was used to compare the variations in these components, and the results revealed higher abundances of certain amino acids and organic acids in WDG. These differences may explain the higher efficacy of WDG. This study shows the differences between DG and WDG included variation in the content, which provides a basis for the study of WDG and support for the standardization of Chinese medicine processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]