| TCM | traditional Chinese Medicine; |
| AR | Alismatis rhizoma; |
| SAR | salt-processed AR; |
| BAR | bran-processed AR; |
| UHPLC-QTOF-MS/MS | ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with quadrupole time-of-flight-mass spectrometer; |
| PCA | principal component analysis; |
| PLS-DA | partial least squares-discrimination analyses; |
| VIP | variable importance in the projection; |
| One-way ANOVA | one-way analysis of variance; |
| A group | raw AR group; |
| S group | salt-processed AR group; |
| B group | bran-processed AR group; |
| QC | quality control samples. |