Dendrobium, commonly known as SHI-HU in China, is a precious herbal medicine. The high biodiversity of Dendrobium and the therapeutic needs require tools todiscriminate different Dendrobium speciescorrectly. At present, because of their wide usage in TCM, some Dendrobium species are over exploited from the wild. Therefore, it is very important to find other Dendrobium species as alternative resources to substitute the efficacy-confirmed and endangered species,

Recently, Prof. CHUN Ze's team from Chengdu Institute of Biology of CAS performed an experiment in order to  discriminate different Dendrobium species using FTIR spectral features as well as to study the chemical phylogenetic relationships among Dendrobium species through chemometric analysis of their IR spectra.

The researcher analyzed the FTIR spectra of seven Dendrobium species from Yunnan province, China, to study the possibility of discriminating different Dendrobium species based on their species-special IR features. And constructed the chemical phylogenetic relationships through chemometric analysis of their corresponding secondary derivative IR spectra.

Their study results indicated that different Dendrobium species have species-special IR spectral features, which could be used as a new method to discriminate different Dendrobium species. Furthermore, the results from chemical phylogenetic dendrogram showed that D.denneanum and D.crepidatum could be the alternative resources to substitute D.chrysotoxum, D.officinale and D.nobile which were officially recorded in Chinese Pharmacopoeia.

The study entitled “Discrimination and chemical phylogenetic study of seven species ofDendrobiumusing infrared spectroscopy combined with cluster analysis” has been published in Journal of Molecular Structure,1037 (2013) 40-48.