Journal of Traditional Medicine & Clinical Naturopathy
Open Access

Abstract

As herbal medicines are becoming commercialized, the safety, quality and efficacy of herbal products have become a great concern to the pharmacy world and in order to ensure this, an optimized standardization method is needed. In view of this, a review on plant fingerprinting was carried out using the systematic review methods indicating regions of the world where most of the studies have been carried out. Years of studies and various analytical techniques or methods were used to identify the plants and their common metabolites. Results indicated genetic, chemical and morphological fingerprint as the major types highlighting genetic fingerprint as the most common type of plants fingerprint applied technique. Other individual types of genetic fingerprints such as SSR were indicated as the common types, so also for chemicals, HPTLC are used as the most common types. Regions like Asia have carried out studies on plant fingerprinting and most of these studies were carried out in recent years within the 2014 and 2018. In an attempt to show that analytical methods used in plant fingerprinting are not novel standardization techniques or procedures, two herbal products like sample D1 and D2 were purchased from the open markets and the herbal concoctions were meant to be used for erectile dysfunctions, using TLC fingerprinting techniques, where D1 and D2 are proposed to be the same. Further detailed investigation using LC-MS was done to characterize the major components in the herbal concoctions and phytochemical analysis shows that saponins, alkaloids and tannins are present in the products

Biography

Ezekiel O Afolabi is currently working in the Dept. of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of Jos at Nigeria. His research interests are medicinal plants, chromatography and herbal medicine etc.

E-mail: afolabie52@gmail.com