Dendrobium officinale is a traditional Chinese medicine and nourishing food in China. Polysaccharide content was used as a criterion for evaluating the quality of D. officinale. At present, epiphytic cultivation is the main cultivation method of D. officinale in China. In the present study, D. officinale was collected under various growing conditions to compare its polysaccharide content in an attempt to discover the most favorable growing conditions for D. officinale, which can be used to guide the artificial cultivation production of D. officinale.

Dendrobium officinale is a famous traditional Chinese medicine and nourishing food in China. The active constituents in D. officinale include a variety of chemical components such as polysaccharides, bibenzyl, phenanthrenes, and flavonoids etc. Among them, polysaccharide was selected as the quality control marker for D. officinale in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. The previous studies found that the content of polysaccharide constituents in D. officinale from different growing origins had significant differences. To the best of our knowledge, whether the secondary metabolites other than polysaccharides are similarly different in D. officinale from different origins has not been reported. In the present continuing study, UPLC-Q/TOF-MS coupled with multivariate analysis were employed for comparative analysis of the secondary metabolites of D. officinale from different growing origins. At last, 12 differential secondary metabolites of D. officinale from different origins were identified. Network pharmacological analysis results indicated that these differential secondary metabolites of D. officinale from different origins are mainly involved in neuropsychiatric related disorder diseases. This investigation will provide a valuable information for doctors and consumers in clinical practice.