Background:
Herbal drugs play a significant role to maintain the human healthiness
and to treat the ailments since the dawn of civilization. Moreover, these plants have
provided many lead compounds that culminated in modern medicine. A single herb is regarded
as mini-combinatorial library of phytoconstituents hence the quality control of herbal
drugs in an herbal formulation is not an easy task because a number of factors impact their
pharmacological efficiency and consistent therapeutic effects. Hence, to provide consistent
beneficial therapeutic effects, standardized herbal products of consistent quality and purity
are required.
Methods:
This review is based on publications obtained by a selective search in PubMed
using the keywords “Standardized herbal products”, “fingerprinting”, “authentication”,
“chemometric, hyphenated techniques”, “quality control of herbal drugs”, “identification”.
Results:
In the era of modernization, chromatographic techniques coupled with sophisticated
spectroscopic analytical methods are used in estimating the authenticity, identity and characteristic
of herbal products. Further, with the advancement of computer technology, chemometrics
methods have become a leading tool with an unsupervised pattern recognition technique
for handling multivariate data without prior knowledge about the studied samples and
mines more beneficial and valuable information about the chemical entities from the raw data.
Conclusion:
Standardization of HDs chromatographic fingerprint is not always a perfect
way to present all compounds. To assess the quality of medicinal plants, new ways are regularly
being explored such as combination chemical fingerprint with biological methods, biofingerprint
and metabolic fingerprint quality metrology, pharmacodynamics and export system
of medicinal plants have been researched in some groups but still a significant amount
of work is required to achieve a perfect system for quality evaluation of herbal drugs. Further,
novel chemometric techniques have been unfolded that mines more beneficial and valuable
information about the chemical entities from the raw data. So this review emphasis
mainly on hyphenated techniques associated with chemometric method used in herbal drugs
for identifying more valuable information and various methods for providing data, among
which most commonly used techniques are chemometric resolution method and Principal
Component Analysis (PCA) method.
Analysis of labels of medicinal teas from formal trade and notes on the lack of concern for botanical nomenclature
