Identification and quantification
of herbal medicines

Using advanced chromatography to identify active markers and mass spectrometry to quantify the trace amounts, our process ensures the safety and efficacy of the active ingredients in your herbal medicine product.

Our findings are used to help standardise the production of your herbal medicines and ensure consistency in dosage and potency for batch release testing.

We use the state-of-the-art CAMAG® HPTLC System or advanced High-Performance Thin-Layer Chromatography (HPTLC) to confirm and identify the herbal substance in the sample. HPTLC is a powerful tool for rapidly comparing several samples in parallel, checking for adulteration, monitoring purity and stability, and quantifying marker compounds. The end result from the CAMAG is a unique chromatographic fingerprint based on UV colour spectra.

Once the herb has been correctly identified with the known active plant markers using advanced HPTLC, it under goes a potency assessment using mass spectrometry, specifically Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (LCMS-MS).  The sophisticated instrument produces a peaks for both the sample and the comparative standard which are proportional to the concentration present.

A calibration curve is prepared and this is used to calculate the exact concentration of the actives in the sample – as low as parts per billion, even parts per trillion!

We use the state-of-the-art CAMAG® HPTLC System or advanced High-Performance Thin-Layer Chromatography (HPTLC).