Liquid Chromatography: Chapter 19. Applications of Liquid Chromatography in the Quality Control of Traditional Chinese Medicines, an Overview

A characteristic of traditional medicinal practices, such as traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) and Indian ayurveda, is the abundant use of plants as drugs. However, the bottleneck in the use of herbal drugs is the control of their safety, effectiveness, and quality. Good quality control (QC) is necessary to achieve the standards of modern medicines. Liquid chromatography, being a powerful universal separation technique, is widely available in laboratories and easily hyphenated with other spectroscopic and biochemical techniques. A number of LC-based strategies—such as multicomponent quantitation, fingerprinting, bioaffinity chromatography, and on-flow assays for screening—have been used for the comprehensive QC of TCMs, lead finding, and identification of active constituents. In this chapter, the applications and development of such LC-based methods for TCMs and other herbal drugs are presented and discussed. Some future trends are given.