New Approaches in Characterisation of Herbal Preparations

New techniques have recently been established in instrumental analytics and molecular biology, which are also applicable to medicinal plants. We could demonstrate the suitability of such methods for identification of herbal preparations by PCR-based methods and for characterisation of herbal preparations by NMR-fingerprinting in combination with principal component analysis [1, 2]. The next step is characterisation of biological activities and correlation with fingerprint profiling. Extracts with solvents of different polarity (Ethanol, Ethanol/Water, Water, Dichloromethane) were obtained from herbal substance of Chelidonium majus L. and characterised by means of HPLC and NMR-fingerprinting. Extracts were applied to human liver cells (HepG2) and cell proliferation was monitored in a real time cellular monitoring system, xCELLigence (Roche). Growth of HepG2 cells was drastically inhibited compared to control by ethanolic extracts and partially by ethanolic/aequeous extracts. For aqueous extracts and dichloromethane extracts only minor growth inhibition was observed. Toxic effects of the extracts will be further investigated with expression profiling using DNA microarray technology to check if there is a correlation with known toxic effects which have been reported to herbal preparations containing Chelidonium majus

References: 1. Daniel C et al. (2008) Zeitschrift für Phytotherapie 29: 270–274

2. Kersten T et al. (2008) Zeitschrift für Phytotherapie 29: 122–128