中药化学成分复杂、药效物质基础不明确，是制约中药发展的一个很重要的因素。中成药生产过程一般包括提取、浓缩、纯化、干燥、制剂成型等，常需经过加热、酸碱调节等处理，这些处理过程可能会使有效成分发生降解等化学变化，直接影响中药制剂的质量，导致临床有效性和安全性难以保证。本项目以中药酚酸类化合物为研究对象，采用在线紫外光谱技术、核磁共振技术、质谱技术和化学计量学多元曲线分辨的方法，建立能够快速反映中药酚酸类化合物含量变化的分析方法，在此基础上，深入研究不同条件下酚酸类化合物降解现象，阐明其降解机理和变化规律。通过本项目研究，可以掌握酚酸类成分在中成药生产中的动态变化规律，解决中药制药过程中出现的关键共性科学问题，提高中药制药过程的质量控制水平。

Among the factors of impediment to development of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), its chemical complexity and unclear efficient compounds are primary. These challenges mainly lie in the multi-component and multi-species composition of many TCM, but can also be attributed to widely reported deficiencies in TCM standardization and quality control. In most cases, the TCM production process consists of the following indispensable unit operations: extraction, concentration, purification, drying and preparation, etc. Heating and acid/alkali adjustment are commonly used, which may cause chemical changes such as degradation of active components during these processes, and directly affect the quality of TCM preparation. Thus, clinical safety and efficacy depended on the quality of TCM products cannot be guaranteed.Based on spectroscopy techniques such as on-line UV spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance, and mass spectrometry and multivariate curve resolution chemometrics, this study has focused on investigating degradation mechanism of phenolic acids from TCM under different conditions, and developing a fast analytical method for timely determination of the concentration changes of phenolic acids. The degradation law of phenolic acids could be found and the quality control of TCM production process can also be further improved through this study.