Abstract: This study aimed to establish a characteristic high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) fingerprint for the sorghum cultivar “Hongyingzi” based on phenolic compounds. A total of 17 “Hongyingzi” sorghum samples collected from Renhuai and surrounding regions in Guizhou and 8 other varieties used for Chinese liquor brewing collected from regions outside Guizhou were fingerprinted by HPLC. The chromatographic conditions were set as follows: gradient elution using 0.1% formic acid aqueous solution as mobile phase A and acetonitrile as mobile phase B, column temperature 25 ℃, flow rate 0.5 mL/min, and detection wavelength 288 nm. Common peaks found in all the fingerprints were used to evaluate the similarity among these samples and they were analyzed by cluster analysis and principal component analysis. Results indicated that all the “Hongyingzi” sorghum samples showed high similarities over 0.97 under the common pattern while the similarities among the other sorghum samples were lower than 0.90. In the cluster analysis and principal component analysis, the “Hongyingzi” sorghum samples were mostly clustered into one category at a discriminant distance of 5 and were distinguished from the other varieties. The established HPLC fingerprinting method was a convenient and efficient method to identify “Hongyingzi” sorghum from the other varieties and for quality control of “Hongyingzi” sorghum.

Key words: “Hongyingzi” sorghum, fingerprint, high performance liquid chromatography, cluster analysis, principal component analysis