Chromatographic Fingerprinting of Medicinal Plants: A Reliable Tool for Quality Control.

Medicinal plants have been an integral part of traditional and modern healthcare systems, serving as primary sources of bioactive compounds. However, ensuring the safety, efficacy, and authenticity of herbal medicines remains a global challenge due to issues such as adulteration, variability in phytochemical content, and lack of standardization. Chromatographic fingerprinting has emerged as a reliable and holistic approach for quality control of medicinal plants, as it provides comprehensive chemical profiles rather than focusing on a single marker compound. Techniques such as thin-layer chromatography (TLC/HPTLC), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography (GC), and advanced hyphenated methods (LC-MS, GC-MS, UPLC-QTOF) are extensively employed to generate characteristic fingerprints for authentication, detection of adulteration, and consistency evaluation. This review discusses the principles, applications, advantages, limitations, regulatory perspectives, and recent advances of chromatographic fingerprinting, with case studies on key medicinal plants and formulations. Integration with chemometrics, metabolomics, and artificial intelligence is highlighted as a future direction to enhance standardization of herbal medicines.