Chemometric Feature Selection and Classification of Ganoderma lucidum Spores and Fruiting Body Using ATR-FTIR Spectroscopy

Ganoderma lucidum (G. lucidum) spores as a valuable Chinese herbal medicine have vast marketable prospect for its bioactivities and medicinal efficacy. This study aims at the development of an effective and simple analytical method to distinguish G. lucidum spores from its fruiting body, which is of essential importance for the quality control and fast discrimination of raw materials of Chinese herbal medicine. Attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy combined with the appropriate chemometric methods including penalized discriminant analysis, principal component discriminant analysis and partial least squares discriminant analysis has been proven to be a rapid and powerful tool for discrimination of G. lucidum spores and its fruiting body with classification accuracy of 99%. The model leads to a well-performed selection of informative spectral absorption bands which improve the classification accuracy, reduce the model complexity and enhance the quantitative interpretations of the chemical constituents of G. lucidum spores regarding its anticancer effects.