The medicinal source of Nymphaeaceae is the dried flower buds of Nymphaeacea candida, a perennial aquatic herbaceous plant in the Nymphaeaceae family. Nymphaeacea candida has the effects of reducing fever, relieving cough, calming the mind, and protecting the heart and brain. It is widely used in compound preparations such as Zukamu granules, Yan Xiao Dinar syrup, and fever reducing benazepril syrup. Modern pharmacological studies have shown that the extract of lotus flower has various biological activities such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, hypoglycemic, hepatoprotective, and neuroprotective properties. Polyphenols and flavonoids are the main characteristic components of its extract. Snow white water lilies are mainly distributed in ponds, swamps, and lakes in Ili, Bohu, Altay, and some areas of Central Asia in Xinjiang, China. However, in recent years, due to human development of nature, the ponds and lakes that the snow-white water lily relies on for survival have been shrinking, and the production of wild snow-white water lily medicinal materials has also been decreasing. It has now been listed as a second level endangered wild plant in China. At present, the commercially available sleeping lotus medicinal materials in the market mainly rely on imports, but these imported sleeping lotus medicinal materials have the defects of wide sources and unclear origins. Some literature reports suggest that the sleeping lotus medicinal materials sold on the market may be soft haired toothed leaf sleeping lotus. After years of introducing and domesticating wild varieties from Bohu, Urumqi Green Garden Landscape Engineering Co., Ltd. has successfully cultivated and planted the snow-white sleeping lotus. Therefore, based on the collection of different sources and origins of water lily medicinal materials, as well as two batches of commercially available samples and soft haired toothed leaf water lily, an HPLC fingerprint spectrum of water lily medicinal materials was constructed and a determination and analysis method combining one test and multiple evaluations was developed. The water lily medicinal materials were preliminarily analyzed and compared with commercially available samples and soft haired toothed leaf water lily, in order to provide data reference for the development and application of water lily medicinal materials.

In this experiment, 15 batches of cultivated snow-white lotus were all second-generation self propagating sources, collected in various cultivation ponds with different soil environments from May 2021 to August 2021. The introduction period included from 2017 to 2020. Due to the significant damage to the growth environment of snow-white lotus in Yili region, multiple attempts were made to search for areas where the original snow-white lotus had dried up. Until June 2021, only a small number of wild snow-white lotus were collected, so the main sources of introduction came from Bosten Lake and Altay region in Xinjiang. Two batches of wild snow-white sleeping lotus flowers were collected from different watersheds in the Ili River Valley in June and September 2021, respectively.

The one test multiple evaluation method can not only be used for quality control of multiple components, but also solve the problems of scarce reference materials and high testing costs. It is a hot method and development direction for content determination and quality control of traditional Chinese medicine. However, using only chemical composition as an evaluation index is difficult to meet the needs of quality control for ethnic medicines. At present, the combination of fingerprint spectrum and one-sided multi evaluation method is a common means of quality control for traditional Chinese medicine, which avoids the drawbacks of evaluating the quality of medicinal materials solely based on their content. This article constructed a fingerprint spectrum of the water lily, identifying and determining the chromatographic peaks of gallic acid, methyl gallate, water lily phenol, geraniol, tannic acid, firework glycoside, and 1,2,3,4,6-pentagalloyl glucose. The composition and content of the 17 batches of sleeping lotus medicinal herbs are roughly the same, and there is no significant difference. The similarity results with the control fingerprint spectrum are all greater than 0.9. However, the similarity between the two batches of commercially available sleeping lotus medicinal herbs and the control fingerprint spectrum is only 0.568 and 0.730, respectively. In addition, literature has reported through DNA barcode research that commercially available water lilies are highly similar to white water lilies and soft haired toothed leaf water lilies, and the results of this study also confirm this. This quality analysis method can evaluate the quality of lotus flower medicinal materials from both qualitative and quantitative aspects, improve the quality standards of lotus flower medicinal materials, standardize their sources, and provide reference data for the development and application of lotus flower medicinal materials.