FINGERPRINTING ANALYSIS AND MARKER COMPOUNDS IN QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF PHYTOPHARMACEUTICALS

Since decades, human beings have been utilizing plants to fulfill their food, medicine, and shelter needs. In the modern era plants, plant-derived products are developed as medicine and drug containing phytoconstituents by combining traditional knowledge and modern technologies. The presence of these phytoconstituents is needed to validate qualitatively and quantitatively to serve the purpose of the development of ‘phytopharmaceutical’. To achieve this, explicit plant species, the exact amount of phytoconstituents to show efficacy is required, i.e., quality control of the drug is crucial. Hence, this review focuses on different quality control attributes of herbal material and related products to develop as a ‘pharmaceutical drug’. Considering marker compounds and fingerprint analysis as the main characteristic features for maintaining the quality of herbal drugs, this review has been designed. Using these features, falsification is detected in crude drugs, extracts, and final products with the application of different spectroscopic, chromatographic techniques. Thus, this review has quoted the use of reliable, efficient analytical tools through recapitulation of different case studies of adulteration detection of plant material, determination of phytoconstituents present in extracts, and formulations using chromatographic and spectroscopic methods to provide a quality assessment.