MARKER FINGERPRINTS ORIGINATING FROM TLC AND HPLC FOR SELECTED PLANTS FROM THE LAMIACEAE FAMILY

Phytochemical analysis of plant extracts is an increasingly important field of analytical chemistry, and for several reasons. In the case of medicinal plants usually traded in a dried and crumbled form, phytochemical analysis serves the purpose of authentication of herbal material and protects patients against adulteration. In botanical sciences, phytochemical analysis is employed for the development of plant systematics known as chemotaxonomy. Due to an unknown composition of plant extracts and an inherent difficulty in selecting proper phytochemical standards, a phytochemical approach has been developed known as fingerprinting. This approach circumvents tedious identification of individual constituents of plant extracts and instead, focuses on a comparison of the whole chromatograms in order to trace similarities and dissimilarities among the plants. In this study, we present the results of a comparison of six plant species belonging to three genera of the Lamiaceae family (i.e., Salvia, Thymus, and Dra...