A Metabolomics-Based Strategy for the Quality Control of Traditional Chinese Medicine: Shengmai Injection as a Case Study

Figure 1

Schematic diagram of the strategy used for the quality control of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). (1) LC-TOF-MS analysis of TCM; (2) Pretreatment data obtained from the LC-TOF-MS analysis; (3) Data export using software; (4) Exported.xml data files are analyzed using the open source XCMS package to pick, align, and quantify features; (5) The resulting 3D matrix contains arbitrarily assigned peak index, retention time, and abundance value (.xls file); (6) The  .xls data files are then exported to SIMCA-P software 12.0 (Umetrics, Umeå, Sweden) for multivariate statistical analysis; (7) A quality control standard is then established; (8) The established standard is used for quality control of TCM.