Abstract
Red ginseng is made of white ginseng through the steaming and drying procedure. In this process, the amounts of toxic elements of ginseng are decreased and those of effective components, ginsenosides are increased. In order to identify the components alteration of white ginseng by processing time, we applied HPLC-based metabolomics approach combined with the principal component analysis (PCA) multivariate analysis. White ginsengs were steamed at 0, 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 h, respectively and followed by drying process at moderate temperature. Then the steamed ginsengs and the commercial red ginsengs were analyzed by HPLC. On the basis of HPLC results, PCA multivariate analysis was applied for evaluating the quality of red ginseng, which showed the processed ginsengs are grouped by processed time because less polar ginsenosides were increased in proportion as the steaming time was increased. The purchased red ginsengs were distributed in the range of $0{\sim}1$ hour steaming time. This pilot experiment suggests that HPLC-based metabolomics approach is able to allow the quality of herbal medicines to be controlled with a simple and economic method.
