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Astragali Radix (AR) is widely used because of its dual use in medicine and food, and its quality evaluation is of great importance. In this study, a pseudo-targeted metabolomics approach based on scheduled multiple reaction monitoring (sMRM) was developed, and a total of 114 compounds with good linearity, sensitivity and reproducibility were selected for relative quantification. With the help of multivariate and univariate analysis, 26 differential compounds between wild/semi-wild AR (AR-W) and cultivated AR (AR-C) were determined. Then 5 marker compounds were screened out by lasso regression, and further verified by systematic clustering, random forest, support vector machine, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. In addition, malonyl-substituted flavonoids showed relative higher content in AR-W. Thus, the malonyl-substitution was the characteristic for flavonoids in AR-W. In conclusion, the application of pseudo-targeted metabolomics and various statistical methods could offer multi-dimensional information for the holistic quality evaluation of AR.

Oral diseases caused by infectious pathogens raises significant concerns in public health. In the light of side effects of current antibiotics therapy and growing drug resistance of pathogenic bacteria, natural products have become attractive alternatives for antibiotics agents in dental practice. This current study investigated the effects of polysaccharides extracted from Zizyphus jujuba Mill. on three major oral biofilm-forming pathogenic bacteria including caries-inducing Streptococcus mutans, lesions-causing MRSA, and periodontitis-related Porphyromonas gingivalis, as well as general oral microbiota. Our results demonstrated that jujube polysaccharide prepared in this study was mainly composed by galacturonic acid with an average molecular weight 242 kDa, which were further characterized for structural features by FT-IR spectra and NMR spectroscopy analysis. This jujube polysaccharide was shown to exhibit remarkable inhibitory effects against all the tested oral bacterial pathogens through various mechanisms including growth inhibition, biofilm prevention and disruption, intervention of bacterial infection (adhesion and invasion), attenuation of cytotoxicity, modulation of excessive inflammatory response of LPS-stimulated and MRSA-infected macrophages as well as positive regulation of oral microbiota. The present study paves the way to explore jujube polysaccharides for the prevention and treatment of oral infectious diseases. Graphic Abstract.