Abstract
The full potential of the herbal market is mainly not realised due to the lack of knowledge of the chemical composition of most herbal products. The growth potential of the herbal medicine industry can only be achieved if the composition of herbal medicine is standardised to ensure proper quality control and accountability. Plant-based nuclear magnetic resonance metabolomics is one such way of ensuring quick and reliable quality control and metabolite profiling to ensure quality and reproducibility of herbal medicine. Nuclear magnetic resonance-based metabolomics is robust and relatively easy to use, thus ensuring that herbal medicine can be verified and quality controlled much quicker and more accurate than is currently the case. Although nuclear magnetic resonance is not as sensitive as other analytical techniques such as liquid chromatography and gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy, it is far more reproducible, non-destructive, covers a much wider dynamic range and sample preparation is simpler and quicker to use. Economical development of herbal medicine and the use of nuclear magnetic resonance-based metabolomics should go hand in hand for a better future for herbal medicine. In this review an introduction is given to herbal extracts as therapeutic agents and to the quality control aspects of herbal medicine by means of metabolomics. The experimental methodology for plant metabolomics which covers extraction, nuclear magnetic resonance analysis and multivariate data analysis is also discussed. Some examples are given on the possible applications of nuclear magnetic resonance-based metabolomics in the industry and finally the future of nuclear magnetic resonance-based metabolomics is discussed regarding advances in research and development.
Highlights
Metabolome analyses use a particular set of analytical techniques (Fig. 1) such as Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS), liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), capillary electrophoresis–mass spectrometry (CE–MS), and thin layer chromatography (TLC) (Shyur and Yang, 2008)
In a study conducted by Van der Kooy et al (2008), the use of NMR spectroscopy in combination with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) showed to be very promising as a method to detect the presence of a particular constituent in herbal extracts that was claimed to be in the extract preparation
Taking all of the above into account, NMR-based metabolomics has some limitations which are the topic of intense current research, but it is evident that it could contribute quite significantly to the Quality control (QC) of herbal medicine (HM)
Summary
Traditional herbal medicine has been used over millennia in many different forms and is still being used as primary health care in many underdeveloped and developing countries. This is still probably the case today and is given as such in the WHO fact file on Traditional Medicine (WHO, 2008) It is stated in this document that in many African and Asian countries up to 80% of the population is still using medicinal plants in primary health care. The difference is mainly due to the complexity of a plant extract that introduces many variables to conventional phyto-medicinal research, which could possibly contribute to chemical complexity and bioactivity. This is very clearly illustrated in the study of Weathers et al (2011), in which the administration of plant material (e.g. Artemisia annua) versus pure drug (e.g. artemisinin) revealed that the bioavailability from the leaves was 45 times more than that of the pure drug. It is noteworthy to consider that a number of plant extracts containing a number of bioactive compounds may be used to provide important combination therapies which affect multiple pharmacological targets and at the same time to provide clinical efficacies which are normally beyond single compoundbased drugs capabilities (Schmidt et al, 2007; Williamson, 2001)
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