Role of TLC to ensure manifestation of individual ingredients in herbal formulation

Abstract

Herbal medicine is gaining its popularity day by day and gradually streaming toward integration into the mainstream healthcare systems. Therefore, standardization of herbal formulations is essential in order to assess quality of the drugs. Two commonly used paradigms, compound and pattern-based approaches, were performed to ensure quality and hence product consistency. A rapid, sensitive, and reproducible high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC) method has been developed for one of the major bioactive markers, piperine. The plates were developed using the mobile phase with toluene–ethyl acetate–formic acid–methanol (3:3:0.8:0.2, v/v). The method was validated for limit of detection, limit of quantification, linearity, specificity, precession, and recovery. The results indicate that the bioactive compound was present in 2.64% w/w in the fruit of Piper nigrum Linn. and 0.253% in a herbal formulation. Each ingredient was analyzed vis-a-vis the herbal formulation and the reflectance spectrum of the matching component(s) to ensure the presence of each ingredient in the herbal formulation. The individual component adding up has also resulted similar fingerprint pattern as that of herbal formulation. Thus, the TLC method could be a rapid tool for the delineation of each individual ingredient in the finished products for authenticity, efficacy, and for batch-to-batch consistency.