Quality Control of Bacopa monnieri by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography Fingerprinting Combined with Chemometric Methods

Background: Bacopa monnieri globally known for its tremendous memory enhancing and vitality potential which is mainly attributed to its major bioactive compound, i.e., bacoside A and bacopaside I. But differences in harvesting time, maturity, and geographical locations might result in batch-to-batch variation in active constituents which leads to quality inconsistency among samples. Objectives: The present work was carried out to develop the chemical fingerprint and quality consistency of B. monnieri. Materials and Methods: Twenty-four accessions of B. monnieri were collected from two provinces of Eastern India (Odisha and West Bengal) and were evaluated by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) technique by selecting twelve common peaks. In addition, the method was validated in terms of precision, stability, repeatability, and recovery test. Moreover, chemometric analyses such as hierarchical cluster analysis, principal component analysis, and discriminant analysis were constructed from chemical fingerprint data to classify sample of different geographical origins. Results: The similarities analysis values were within the range of 0.81%-0.98%. In quantitative analysis, eight analytes displayed acceptable regression (R-2 > 0.989%) within the test range. The results of chemometrics were in agreement and grouped B. monnieri samples into two groups in accordance with the geographical origin. Bacopaside II, bacopaside I, and bacoside A3 are the influencing variable responsible for differentiating B. monnieri samples from different regions. Conclusion: The results suggested that HPLC fingerprint in combination with chemometric techniques and quantitative analysis could be used for differentiation and assessing the quality consistency of B. monnieri.