Development, Assessment, Improvement, and Standardization of Methods in Herbal Drug Research

HD, therefore, the quality assurance and the authenticity of HD must be assured (Heinrich, 2015). The complexity of herbs and extracts from different sources of HD, typically consisting of many constituents, has raised major quality issues. The bioactive compounds of extracts and/or HD preparation is typically very complex, and may vary, if the exact chemical composition is not determined accurately and specifically, the reported bioactivity or pharmacological effects may not always be reproducible. The assurance of high-quality HD with reproducible quality, acceptable, good efficacy, and safe from herbal drugs is a challenging task. As a consequence, the availability of appropriate analytical methods is highly required not only for their identification and standardization, but also for the detection of adulterants and contaminants (Muyumba et al., 2021). The analytical methods either chemical or biological-based methods used for quality controls of HD must be official methods, otherwise, the methods should first be validated according to the latest official guidelines. Without analytical method validation, the reliability of the data cannot be confirmed, and the results cannot be replicated by other scientists (Indrayanto, 2022).The quality control and authentication of HD are typically carried out by evaluating the characteristics of biological and physicochemical properties along with microscopic and macroscopic observations. The characterization and discrimination of HD performed using instrumental analyses can use three approaches, namely (1) single component analysis or targeted analysis by investigating along with identification and quantitative analysis of marker compounds which are responsible to certain biological activities, (2) fingerprinting profiling by comparing the profiles of different HD, and (3) metabolomic studies either using targeted or untargeted metabolomics (Ruiz et al., 2016). Due to large datasets obtained during quality control of HD using these instruments, the use of chemometrics is a must. Pattern recognition and multivariate calibration are among chemometrics techniques widely used in analysis of HD (Zhu et al., 2014). and processed Fuzi, herbal medicine used for the treatment of various diseases. Forty two metabolic markers were identified to discriminate raw and steamed-processed Fuzi. Six alkaloids, namely mesaconitine, aconitine, hypaconitine, benzoylmesaconine, benzoylaconine, and benzoylhypaconine can be used as markers for differentiation pof raw and processed Fuzi. DESI-MSI combined with metabolomics provides an efficient method to visualize the changeable rules and screen the metabolic markers of Aconitum alkaloids during processing.Overall, three approaches (single component analysis, metabolic fingerprinting and metabolomics studies) have been used by authors to discover chemical markers which are related to biological activities as well as identification, differentiation and classification of HD.