Quantifying Nature’s Novelty: Trends in HPLC and HPTLC Fingerprinting for Herbal Drug Analysis

The efficacy of herbal medicines in therapy, their cultural suitability, and relatively low degree of side effects have made them an inherent aspect of health care globally, yet the variability and complexity of phytochemical compositions are important concerns in quality, safety and reproducibility. Precisely, chromatographic fingerprinting techniques have emerged as an effective way of full characterization of herbal drugs particularly the High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and the High-Performance Thin Layer Chromatography (HPTLC). This review discusses the recent developments of these techniques using the latest state-of-the-art techniques such as Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography (UHPLC), hyphenated techniques (LC-MS/MS and HPTLC-MS), densitometric analysis and combination of chemometric approaches. It covers methodological approaches, its application in the standardization of herbal drugs and a comparison of the two approaches. The findings reveal that HPLC is more sensitive and accurate in quantitative analysis, whilst HPTLC is fast, cost-effective and high-throughput screening. In addition, chemometric techniques are important to interpret the data, which enables to categorize the data correctly and detect the adulteration. Regardless of these advances, current problems such as the variability of phytochemicals and the lack of standard reference materials remain to be addressed, implying that future advances will be made with the help of hybridized chromatographic methods in the era of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and metabolomics.