A review of the application of vibrational spectroscopy combined with chemometrics in genus Panax

The Genus Panax is of great medicinal value, which has attracted worldwide attention due to its wide range of pharmacological action and chemical composition. Adulteration or damage to consumers is a common phenomenon, and traditional analytical techniques are expensive, destructive, complex and time-consuming. Vibrational spectroscopy possesses great application prospect in Panax, and due to its high accuracy, rapidity, convenience and effectiveness, it has become an effective way to elucidate the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Panax. Chemometrics has been built for processing multivariate data generated by spectroscopy techniques that can overcome the limitations of vibrational spectroscopy. This paper showed a comprehensive and critical review of current trends and advances in the field of vibrational spectroscopy for the analysis of the Panax, presenting the geographical distribution, species classification, chemical composition, and pharmacological action of Panax, summarizing a variety of vibrational spectroscopy (infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, hyperspectral image) and combining them with chemometrics for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of Panax. As a result, some challenges and future perspectives are proposed based on the current achievements, which provide reference values for in-depth research and practical applications of Panax and contribute to the development of new techniques for Panax.