DNA Molecular Markers Based Authentication of Herbal Drugs – A Review

Author(s)

Biswas, K., Biswas, R.

Author's Affiliation

Abstract

Herbal drugs mainly comprising of the crude plant parts, extracts, oils, gums, mixtures of extracts, is an integrated part of the traditional system of medicine especially in the developing countries. About 75% of the world population is dependent on this system of medicine and there has a global market of US $62 billion and is expected to grow to US $5 trillion by the year 2050. However, there is no proper method of standardization to authenticate these drugs which are adulterated. The adulteration lies mainly with the starting material. This adulteration may be intentional or non-intentional. The authentication of these medicinal plants are carried out up to a certain extent by chemical fingerprinting methods which however may not give the correct identification due to variation in the chemical composition arising from age and genotype of the plants and due to geographical variation. Hence the most desirable way to authenticate these plants is by the genome based methods. Developing DNA molecular markers and bar-coding these plants by sequencing a standard region of the DNA are best way to identify the adulterants as well as authenticate the desired species of plant. Through this review an attempt has been made to present in a nutshell the various genome based methods used by scientists throughout the world mainly in the last decade to successfully develop and establish various DNA markers for authentication of different medicinal plants and herbal drugs.

Keywords

World Health Organization, Genotype, Restriction Fragment length polymorphism

Cite This Article

Biswas, K., & Biswas, R. (2014). DNA Molecular Markers Based Authentication of Herbal Drugs - A Review. International Journal for Pharmaceutical Research Scholars (IJPRS), 3(1), 581-593.