Gain deeper insights into traditional Chinese medicines using multidimensional chromatography combined with chemometric approaches

Three-tiered authentication of herbal traditional Chinese medicine ingredients used in women’s health provides progressive qualitative and quantitative insight

“…Furthermore, emerging research trends are centered around gas chromatography (GC), mass spectroscopy (MS), UV/visible spectrophotometric techniques, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and tandem approaches ( Booker et al, 2014 ; 2016 ; Liang et al, 2018 ), which allow for a more complex analysis and characterization of single compounds into parts per billion range (MS) and give detailed fingerprints of metabolites across varying polarities (NMR) ( Fitzgerald et al, 2019 ). Recent studies furthermore propose a combination of multidimensional chromatography with chemometric methods, which exhibit stronger capacity for screening and separating bioactive compounds in complex TCM samples ( Yang et al, 2023 ). For the detection of authenticity issues and compound adulteration, specifically chromatography, its tandem technologies and combinations with exploration/classification/regression algorithms, are relatively mature and widely applied ( Liu et al, 2023 ).…”

“…Genome skimming was found to be more effective than DNA metabarcoding for species-level authentication within the Echinacea genus and might be used instead of metabarcoding once its application is more economical for applied herbal quality control. The trend in TCM chemical quality control is towards establishing chemometric applications based on the data gathered from different quality control methods ( Liu et al, 2023 ; Yang et al, 2023 ). A review by Kandil et al (2022) on advances in quality control of fenugreek seeds, highlights that chromatography, like HPTLC and DNA-based methods, like DNA barcoding and the NGS when coupled to multivariate analysis, can yield promising results in herbal quality control.…”