Application of analytical and chemometric techniques in authentication and quality evaluation of some commercially important indigenous medicinal plants

Abstract

Owing to superior merits, the use of herbal medicines is rising globally leading to the large-scale production of herbal products, necessitating the need to develop standards to ensure their quality, efficacy and safety. A large number of factors play a critical role in the quality of herbals which is quite difficult to assess because of their complex composition. State-of-the-art instrumental techniques coupled with modern statistical tools have high potential and reliability in ensuring the quality of herbals. In the present work, three indigenous, highly traded medicinal plants, Bala, Arjuna and Harad were investigated based upon developing customised extraction methods and chemical fingerprinting using modern instrumentation techniques followed by multiple marker analysis and pharmacological studies well supported by chemometric evaluation. This exploration resulted in establishing similarities and dissimilarities between different samples of the three selected plants coming from different geographical sources, cultivated or marketed, different genus/ species/ plant parts etc. Among Bala samples, Sida cordifolia roots showed the highest resemblance to the roots of Sida rhombifolia; for Arjuna samples, stem bark from the cultivated and medium-age trees together with the samples from Central India proved to be the best raw material with high bioactive content. The cultivated Harad samples from Central India also demonstrated to be the finest raw material. The results shall be of immense value to all working in the area of herbals, and in particular the herbal drug industry and to end consumers. The data generated has done signification value addition to all three industrially important plants, especially in discriminating closely related species, and different geographical and market samples. newline