Multi-fingerprint and quality control analysis of tea polysaccharides

High performance gel permeation chromatography (HPGPC), ultraviolet–visible spectra (UV), infrared absorption spectra (IR) and ion chromatography (IC) techniques were used in fingerprint analysis of tea polysaccharides (TPS). Multi-fingerprint was applied to assess TPS consistency and to discriminate other polysaccharides in order to achieve the quality control of TPS. The experimental data for spectrogram and chromatogram were used for similarity calculation, included angle cosine method and correlation coefficient method. The results showed that the UV absorption spectra, IR absorption spectra and IC of 22 batches of TPS had a high degree of similarity, respectively, and the similar indexes were up to 0.9985 and 0.9475. Other five polysaccharides were compared with the referential fingerprint, which had an obvious difference. It could conclude that some differences were really existed between TPS and other polysaccharides; and multi-fingerprint is a more useful means to control the quality of TPS than one simple fingerprint. This analytical method is highly rapid, effective, visual and accurate for polysaccharides research.