Quality control of herbal medicines by capillary electrophoresis: potential, requirements and applications.

Herbal preparations, particularly those from traditional Chinese or Indian medicine, are becoming increasingly popular in Europe and the USA. Their application is often based on long-term historic use rather than on scientific evidences; thus, analytical tools to assure their efficacy, safety and consistency are in great demand. This review evaluates the importance of CE for quality control of herbal medicinal products during the last five years. After briefly describing the general characteristics of natural products analysis by CE, numerous applications on medicinal plants or herbal products are summarized. These examples not only reflect the enormous variability of CE with respect to buffer systems and detection modes employed, but also indicate an increasing importance of this separation technique for quality control purposes compared with more established ones such as HPLC.