TY - JOUR ID - discovery10091187 KW - Science & Technology KW - Life Sciences & Biomedicine KW - Pharmacology & Pharmacy KW - herbal medicine KW - medicinal plant KW - analysis KW - quality KW - pharmacopoeia KW - complexity KW - advances KW - NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY KW - SUPERCRITICAL-FLUID CHROMATOGRAPHY KW - GAS-LIQUID-CHROMATOGRAPHY KW - GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGIN KW - MASS-SPECTROMETRY KW - HEART-DISEASE KW - LICORICE ROOT KW - EXTRACTION KW - CONSTITUENTS KW - FLAVONOIDS JF - Frontiers in Pharmacology AV - public N2 - The analysis of medicinal plants has had a long history, and especially with regard to assessing a plant?s quality. The first techniques were organoleptic using the physical senses of taste, smell, and appearance. Then gradually these led on to more advanced instrumental techniques. Though different countries have their own traditional medicines China currently leads the way in terms of the number of publications focused on medicinal plant analysis and number of inclusions in their Pharmacopoeia. The monographs contained within these publications give directions on the type of analysis that should be performed, and for manufacturers, this typically means that they need access to more and more advanced instrumentation. We have seen developments in many areas of analytical analysis and particularly the development of chromatographic and spectroscopic methods and the hyphenation of these techniques. The ability to process data using multivariate analysis software has opened the door to metabolomics giving us greater capacity to understand the many variations of chemical compounds occurring within medicinal plants, allowing us to have greater certainty of not only the quality of the plants and medicines but also of their suitability for clinical research. Refinements in technology have resulted in the ability to analyze and categorize plants effectively and be able to detect contaminants and adulterants occurring at very low levels. However, advances in technology cannot provide us with all the answers we need in order to deliver high-quality herbal medicines and the more traditional techniques of assessing quality remain as important today. EP - 14 A1 - Fitzgerald, M A1 - Heinrich, M A1 - Booker, A VL - 10 UR - https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2019.01480 Y1 - 2020/01/09/ TI - Medicinal Plant Analysis: A Historical and Regional Discussion of Emergent Complex Techniques N1 - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ PB - FRONTIERS MEDIA SA ER -