Inorganic Elemental Determinations of Marine Traditional Chinese Medicine Meretricis concha from Jiaozhou Bay： The construction of Inorganic Elemental Fingerprint Based on Chemometric Analysis

The goal of this paper is to explore the relationship between the inorganic elemental fingerprint and the geographical origin identification ofMeretricis concha, which is a commonly used marine traditional Chinese medicine （TCM） for the treatment of asthma and scald bums. For that, the inorganic elemental contents ofMeretricis concha from five sampling points in Jiaozhou Bay have been determined by means of inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry, and the comparative investigations based on the contents of 14 inorganic elements （A1, As, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Hg, Mn, Mo, Ni, Pb, Se and Zn） of the samples from Jiaozhou Bay and the previous reported Rushan Bay were performed. It has been found that the samples from the two bays are ap- proximately classified into two kinds using hierarchical cluster analysis, and a four-factor model based on principle component analysis could explain approximately 75% of the detection data, also linear discriminant analysis can be used to develop a prediction model to distinguish the samples from Jiaozhou Bay and Rushan Bay with accuracy of about 93%. The results of the present investi- gation suggested that the inorganic elemental fingerprint based on the combination of the measured elemental content and chemom- etric analysis is a promising approach for verifying the geographical origin ofMeretricis concha, and this strategy should be valuable for the authenticity discrimination of some marine TCM.