CHEMOMETRICS: A TECHNIQUE IN HERBAL DRUG STANDARDIZATION

The global use of herbal medicinal products and supplements has increased tremendously. The establishment of advanced and effective quality evaluation system is the premise for authenticity, safety and efficacy of medicinal plants. Chemometrics is the science of relating measurements made on a chemical system or process to the state of the system via application of mathematical or statistical methods. Chemometric techniques provide a good opportunity for withdrawal of more useful chemical information from the original data.

It promotes equipment intellectualization and offers new ideas and methods for the construction of new and high-dimensional and hyphenated equipments. Comprehensive methods and hyphenated techniques associated with chemometrics in optimizing experimental procedures, extracting useful information and supplying various methods of data processing are now more and more widely used in medicinal plants , among which chemometrics resolution methods and principal component analysis(PCA) are most commonly used techniques. 

This review focuses on the recent various important analytical techniques, important chemometrics tools and interpretation of results by PCA, and applications of chemometrics in quality evaluation of medicinal plants in the authenticity, efficacy and consistency. But before analyzing data, pretreatment of data is essential because unknown components or unclear interferences cause overlapped peaks and shifted baseline. Thus, commonly used chemometric techniques in herbal drug standardization (HDS) such as PCA, discriminate analysis (LDA), spectral correlative chromatography (SCC), information theory (IT), local least square (LLS) are elaborated. Thus, the

enhanced fingerprinting analysis combined with chemometric methods is a novel, valid and rapid technique which would provide a powerful and meaningful tool to comprehensively conduct quality control of herbal drugs.