AUTHENTICATION OF AYURVEDIC MEDICINE TRIKATU CHURNA USING NEAR INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY - A NOVEL APPROACH

During the recent past, several Ayurvedic medicines have been prepared and investigated with respect to physio-chemical standardization, pharmacological effects, safety, efficacy, cultivation of medicinal plants and manufacturing practices. The objectives of this study is suggesting a novel method for the authentication of Ayurvedic and Siddha medicines to ensure the identity, quality, purity and detection of adulterants non-destructively using the spectroscopic techniques. The Ayurvedic sample Trikatu Churna, TC, taken for analysis, is a polyhedral formulation of finely powered dried fruits of Piper nigrum, pn, Piper longum, pl, and rhizome of Zingiber officinale, zn, at equal proportions. The customised TC was prepared by mixing at the equal proportion of the pure and dried raw material component powders (reference sample). The NIR spectral characteristics of customised samples were compared with the market samples (test samples) by developing a suitable Chemometric model. Accordingly, a method is proposed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique to bring out strong patterns from their reference TC spectra to validate test samples by identifying its identity, quality and purity non-destructively.