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Received Oct 29, 2017; Accepted Jan 3, 2018
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1. Introduction
Ganoderma, a popular edible and medicinal mushroom, is commonly used as dietary supplements and touted as a remedy to promote health and longevity [1]. So far, more than 200 species of Ganoderma have been found in the world, and Ganoderma lucidum (Leyss. ex Fr.) Karst. and Ganoderma sinense Zhao, Xu et Zhang are officially recorded in Chinese pharmacopoeia [2]. Previous studies have demonstrated that Ganoderma possesses various biological properties, such as antitumor, antiaging, antioxidant, hyperglycemic, and regulating immunity [3–5]. Owing to its satisfactory clinical effects, more and more Ganoderma products as health foods or medicines have appeared at the market. However, it is hard to say whether its quality is good or bad, and it is also difficult to identify whether the raw materials are authentic or adulterant.
For Ganoderma, triterpenoids are the major secondary metabolites and active substances [6]. The pioneering has isolated and identified more than 300 triterpenoids from the spores, fruiting bodies, and cultured mycelia of Ganoderma [7–9]. Triterpenoids could be considered as the “marker compounds” for the chemical evaluation or standardization of Ganoderma. Professor Guo and his team’s researches concluded that the content and composition of triterpenoids vary significantly due to difference in the strain, geographic origin, cultivation method, extraction process, and other factors [10, 11]. Besides, scholars have made a lot of exploratory work on the chromatographic fingerprint of Ganoderma products [12, 13]. However, the traditional fingerprints were always processed by the fingerprint similarity software (2004 or 2012 version), only limited to HPLC profiles without TLC. After that, researchers always apply other statistical software (such as SPSS and SAS) to process the data for cluster analysis or principal component analysis, which is relatively cumbersome and time-consuming. Therefore, it is essential to develop a global chemical profiling method for rapidly evaluating the quality of Ganoderma to ensure the efficacy.
Chemical profile reflects the totality of intrinsic chemical compounds of herbal medicines and emphasizes the integral characterization of a complex system [14, 15]. Here, the global chemical profiling method...