APPLICATIONS OF HPTLC IN HERBAL DRUGS ANALYSIS

The analysis and quality control of herbal medicines are going a step ahead towards an integrative and comprehensive direction, in order to equipment the complex nature of herbal medicines. High-performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC) is one of the sophisticated instrumental techniques for quantitative and qualitative analysis of the herbs and herbal drugs. The reported HPTLC method was found to be rapid, simple, and accurate for substantiation of the herbal plant materials. Multidimensional chromatography is often a good choice in case of very multiplex samples, offering many advantageous features in the analysis of medicinal plants. First of all, multidimensional TLC is the only real multidimensional method in which, after the first separation in the first direction, all compounds can be passed to a second direction. A Quality Control for Authentication 107 fingerprint analysis methods to control the quality of herbal drugs have gradually come into being, such as GC, TLC, HPLC, etc. chromatographic fingerprint analysis of herbal drugs represents a comprehensive qualitative approach for the purpose of species authentication, evaluation of quality, and ensuring the consistency and stability of herbal drugs and their related products. For example, Ginseng and American ginseng, the HPTLC is difficult to distinguish them by only selecting single ginsenosides, but the HPTLC images with digital scanning profiles can easily be differentiated between them.

KEYWORDS: Herbal drugs, High-Performance Thin Layer Chromatography (HPTLC), Analytical methods