The materials for making palm-leaf manuscripts mainly come from the leaves of two palms, Corypha umbraculifera and Borassus flabellifer. Applying a micro-destructive and rapid method to determine the plant species origin is conducive to in-depth cognition of the utilization of the palm-leaf manuscripts and provides a reference for their future conservation. In this study, a batch of standard samples was produced through simulation experiments to search for the criteria to distinguish the two palm species and validate them on the artifacts of the palm-leaf manuscripts of known plant species. Pyrolysis gas-chromatography/mass-spectrometry (Py-GC/MS) was utilized in combination with multivariate statistical analysis to differentiate the C. umbraculifera and B. flabellifer. The results revealed the presence of several triterpenoids in the samples, among which cycloeucalenol derivatives were found only in C. umbraculifera; two lupane-type triterpenoids and one cyclolaudenol and hopane-type triterpenoids were found only in B. flabellifer. The lupane-type triterpene and hopane-type compounds are stable in B. flabellifer. The relative contents of 10 lignin monomers were selected for principal component analysis (PCA), and the results showed a good differentiation between the C. umbraculifera group and the B. flabellifer group. The combination of the characteristic compounds and the PCA method successfully identified different types of plant sources of modern palm-leaf manuscripts, which provides a new idea for the rapid and trace identification study of the species and genera of ancient palm leaf manuscripts.
CHEN Qingle
,
YANG Yimin
,
HAN Bin
,
JIANG Hong
. Species identification of palm-leaf manuscripts based on Py-GC/MS[J]. Journal of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2025
, 42(6)
: 843
-852
.
DOI: 10.7523/j.ucas.2024.078
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