A Review on Quality Control Aspects of Indian Medicinal Plants

Quality control analysis of medicinal plants even their derived formulations are contributed to the quality, safety, and efficacy as well as to their regulatory purpose. Chromatography and their hyphenation with spectroscopic techniques are the most used analytical methods for quality assessment and authentication of medicinal plants and their derived products, also. With a thorough explanation of the analytical techniques used in authentication, the existing situation, and future projections, the present study aims to analyze the quality elements of the authentication of medicinal plants and the formulations developed from them. The results of the review suggested that determining the quality of medicinal plants based on targeted and non-targeted metabolites depends on the verification that the plants are from the same species, the gathering of high-quality raw materials, the extraction process, and the solvents that are acting to make the process more suitable. For thorough metabolomic profiling, a variety of cutting-edge chromatographic and analytical techniques, including HPTLC-MS, HPLC-MS, LC-MS, GC-MS, etc., are utilized. Moreover, chemometric approaches improved the ability to extract crucial chemical information from a wide range of original data. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is the most widely used technique in chemometrics analysis to represent the high dimensionality of metabolite-based data sets for validity, efficacy, and consistency. In order to confirm the scientific evidence for their regulatory purpose and get insights into the current situation and the future horizons for their quality-based standardization of medicinal plants and their derived formulations.