2 and Fig. 3). Considering these results, XAV-939 manufacturer we inferred that the significant FT-IR spectral variations in this study were directly related to changes in major metabolites (sugars and amino acids) and secondary metabolites (aromatic compounds) of ginseng leaves. The overall

metabolic variations between cultivation ages were much greater than those within cultivars. PLS-DA was able to discriminate ginseng cultivars within the same cultivation age groups (Fig. 5). These results show that FT-IR combined with multivariate analysis could be used as a reliable tool for metabolic discrimination of ginseng cultivars. Recently, a novel method combining high performance liquid chromatography fingerprint and simultaneous quantitative analysis of multiple components was developed for quality evaluation of medicinal plants [54] and [55] or cultivar discrimination [53]. However, these chemical fingerprinting protocols require complex sample preparation as well as metabolite analysis. In this regard, FT-IR could be easily applied without these complexities. To verify the practical

applicability of PLS-DA for the discrimination of cultivation ages and cultivars of ginseng, we conducted a cross-validation test (Table 1). In this, 96.15% of the group cases were correctly classified. The average accuracy for the cross-validation test (×10) was 94.8%, which was statistically significant (p = 0.00625). These results clearly show that cultivation ages and cultivars were simultaneously discriminated

through PLS modeling with high accuracies. Kim et al Selleckchem BMS-734016 [56] reported that age discrimination of ginseng roots is possible using NMR or Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS). However, in this study, we showed that it was possible to discriminate cultivation ages and cultivars using multivariate analysis of FT-IR spectra from ginseng leaf samples. We also observed that cultivation age-dependent metabolic changes were many much greater than cultivar-dependent ones in ginseng leaf. These results imply that aging-related metabolites in the roots are transported to the aerial part of ginseng. In conclusion, this study showed that FT-IR combined with multivariate analysis was capable of discerning metabolic differences in ginseng leaf in a cultivation age-dependent or cultivar-dependent manner. Moreover, we showed that quantitative and qualitative modifications of polysaccharide and amide regions of FT-IR spectra from ginseng leaves have the potential to act as metabolic markers for discriminating among different ginseng cultivars and cultivation ages. Similar to the suggestion of Di Donna et al [53] and Schulz and Baranska [44], such metabolic markers could be applied to characterize different cultivars or chemotypes among the same species.