Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1172 Blindern, 0318 Oslo, Norway; Stejarul Research Centre for Biological Sciences, National Institute of Research and Development for Biological Sciences, Alexandru cel Bun Street, 6, 610004 Piatra Neamt, Romania.
Research and Processing Center for Medicinal Plants Plantavorel S.A., Cuza Voda Street, 46, 610019, Piatra Neamt, Romania; Academy of Romanian Scientists, Splaiul Independentei, 54, 050094, Bucharest, Romania.
Phytomedicine. 2018 May 15;44:32-38. doi: 10.1016/j.phymed.2018.03.058. Epub 2018 Mar 21.
Differences in regulatory policies between countries as well as a lack of appropriate standardized methods for the authentication and quality control of herbal products directly impact their quality and safety. Echinacea products are among the top-selling herbal products in Europe and the United States with indications for a broad range of ailments. The increased use of Echinacea species has led to concerns about adulterated products resulting from challenges in morphology-based identification, due to overlapping morphological variation, frequent hybridization between species, and deliberate adulteration.
This study addressed the need for a novel analytical strategy in the authentication of herbal products.
A combination of high performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC) and DNA metabarcoding was employed. Fifty-three Echinacea herbal products marketed across Europe were tested to evaluate the accuracy of these methods in plant identification and their potential for detecting substitutes, adulterants and other unreported plant constituents.
HPTLC provides high resolution in the detection of Echinacea phytochemical target compounds, but does not offer information on the other species within the product. Alternatively, we showed that the limitation of HPTLC in detecting non-targeted species can be overcome by the complementary use of DNA metabarcoding. Using DNA metabarcoding, Echinacea species were detected in 34 out of the 38 retained products (89%), but with a lack of discriminatory resolution at the species level due to the low level of molecular divergence within the Echinacea genus. All of the tested herbal products showed considerable discrepancies between ingredients listed on the label and the ones detected using DNA metabarcoding, registering an overall ingredient fidelity of only 43%.
The results confirm that DNA metabarcoding can be used to test for the presence of Echinacea species and simultaneously to detect other species present in even highly processed and multi-ingredient herbal products.
不同国家的监管政策差异以及缺乏适当的标准化方法来对草药产品进行认证和质量控制，直接影响其质量和安全性。紫锥菊产品是欧洲和美国最畅销的草药产品之一，其适应症广泛。由于基于形态的鉴定存在挑战，由于形态变异重叠、种间频繁杂交以及蓄意掺假，导致出现了掺假产品，因此，增加了对紫锥菊属物种的使用。
本研究提出了一种新的分析策略，用于草药产品的认证。
采用高效薄层色谱（HPTLC）和 DNA 条形码组合方法。对欧洲市场上销售的 53 种紫锥菊草药产品进行了测试，以评估这些方法在植物鉴定中的准确性及其检测替代品、掺杂物和其他未报告植物成分的潜力。
HPTLC 可提供高分辨率的紫锥菊植物化学目标化合物检测，但不能提供产品中其他物种的信息。相反，我们表明，HPTLC 在检测非目标物种方面的局限性可以通过互补使用 DNA 条形码来克服。使用 DNA 条形码，可以在保留的 38 种产品中的 34 种（89%）中检测到紫锥菊属物种，但由于该属内的分子差异较小，在物种水平上缺乏区分分辨率。所有测试的草药产品在标签上列出的成分与使用 DNA 条形码检测到的成分之间存在相当大的差异，总体成分保真度仅为 43%。
结果证实，DNA 条形码可用于检测紫锥菊属物种的存在，并同时检测即使是高度加工和多成分的草药产品中存在的其他物种。
