Chemometrics-Free NIR Barcode Strategy For Identification And Geographical Discrimination Of Chinese Ginseng

With the growing interest in alternative medicine,handy identification and differentiation of herbal medicines are becoming increasingly important.Here we report a chemometrics-free near infrared（NIR）barcode strategy for smart identification and geographical discrimination of Chinese ginseng.This approach needs the transformation of NIR spectra of both ginseng standard and samples into barcode representation through assigning zero intensity to every NIR peak except the peaks having intensities greater than the average peak intensity.Meanwhile,the barcoding condition（only for ginseng standard NIR barcode）such as pad size was carefully optimized.It has been demonstrated that the padding size for each bar in the NIR barcode is 8 cm^-1.By comparing the percentage of nonzero overlap between ginseng standard and sample NIR barcodes,six batches of samples（including ginseng and counterfeit）were successfully identified with 100%accuracy,respectively.Moreover,the discrimination of the origin of ginsengs from three provinces（Jilin,Liaoning and Heilongjiang）of Northeastern China was achieved utilizing NIR barcode method.Clearly,two characteristic bars at 7750 and 8250 cm^-1were inspected in the ginseng sample from Jilin province,two specific bars at 6780and 7015 cm^-1 were displayed in the ginseng sample from Liaoning province and three distinct bars at 6560,6910 and 7995 cm^-1were monitored in the ginseng sample from Heilongjiang province.The results indicate that the proposed method will be greatly expanded and applied as an inspecting platform for the rapid identification and geographical discrimination of other products in herb markets by a smartphone.