Comparison of primary and secondary metabolites for suitability to discriminate the origins of Schisandra chinensis by GC/MS and LC/MS

Discrimination of the origins of plants as traditional medicinal herbs or functional foods is important to accurately comprehend their therapeutic effects or to appropriately utilize their qualities because different environmental backgrounds can induce diverse metabolic changes. In the present study, the origins of the herbal medicine Schisandra chinensis were differentiated using two instrumental approaches, GC/MS and LC/MS. The acquired data were processed using various programs to detect metabolites and statistically examined to measure the suitability of the methods. The R(2)X value of the PCA analysis was used to examine the identified metabolites as potential discriminative markers. The identification of markers by primary metabolites using GC/MS analysis was advantageous because of its reproducibility and the use of a constructed database. However, LC/MS analysis using secondary metabolites provided a greater number of distinguishable variables and higher qualitative R(2)X values for the markers, which suggested that determination of the origins of the plants was more favourable using secondary metabolites.