Multiple compounds determination and fingerprint analysis of Agrimonia pilosa Ledeb by high-performance liquid chromatography

In the present paper, a simple and reliable high-performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLC-DAD) method was developed both for quantitative determination and fingerprint analysis of Agrimonia pilosa Ledeb for quality control. Under the optimized HPLC conditions, seven bioactive compounds including rutin, quercetin-3-rhamnoside, luteoloside, tiliroside, apigenin, kaempferol, and agrimonolide were determined simultaneously. For fingerprint analysis, 11 common peaks were selected as the characteristic peaks to evaluate the similarities of 16 different samples collected from different origins in China. Besides, hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was also performed to evaluate the variation of the raw materials. This is the first report of using a simple method for quality control of A. pilosa Ledeb through multi-component determination and chromatographic fingerprint analysis to the best of our knowledge.