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A Review on Application of DNA Barcoding Technology for Rapid Molecular Diagnostics of Adulterants in Herbal Medicine

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Abstract

The rapid molecular diagnostics of adulterants in herbal medicine using DNA barcoding forms the core of this meticulously detailed review, based on two decades of data. With 80% of the world’s population using some form of herbal medicine, authentication, quality control, and detection of adulterants warrant DNA barcoding. A combined group of keywords were used for literature review using the PubMed, the ISI Web of Knowledge, Web of Science (WoS), and Google Scholar databases. All the papers (N = 210) returned by the search engines were downloaded and systematically analyzed. Detailed analysis of conventional DNA barcodes were based on retrieved sequences for internal transcribed spacer (ITS) (412,189), rbcL (251,598), matK (210,835), and trnH-psbA (141,846). The utility of databases such as The Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD), NCBI, GenBank, and Medicinal Materials DNA Barcode Database (MMDBD) has been critically examined for the identification of unknown species from known databases. The current review gives an overview of the ratio of adulterated to authentic drugs for some countries along with the state of the art technology currently being used in the identification of adulterated medicines. In this review, efforts were made to systematically analyze and arrange the research and reviews on the basis of technical progress. The review concludes with the future of DNA-based herbal medicine adulteration detection, forecasting the reliance on the metabarcoding technology.

Graphical Abstract

DNA barcoding technology for differentiating adulterated herbal medicine

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  • 11 February 2022

    The revised graphic abstract was updated in the online version

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Prof. Jeff Bennetzen, Prof. Jim Leebens-Mack and Dr Srinivasa R. Chaluvedi at UGA, Georgia, USA for useful initial discussions about the phylogeny of the gingers and for their very constructive comments. Sincere thanks to Department of Bioscience and Bioengineering, IIT Guwahati for all technical and infrastructure support and to the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Govt. of India for providing student fellowships to AS and SB.

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  1. Alok Senapati, Supriyo Basak have equal contribution.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Applied Biodiversity Laboratory, O Block, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, Assam, 781039, India

    Alok Senapati & Latha Rangan

  2. Department of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Banasthali Vidyapith, Tonk, Rajasthan, 304 022, India

    Supriyo Basak

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  1. Alok Senapati
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Correspondence to Latha Rangan.

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LR thanks the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India for the NE-DBT fellowship. This research was funded by Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India (GoI) (DIT Grant No: 0526/T/IITG/014/0809/38).

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All authors of the current manuscript declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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Availability of data and material

The data that support the findings of this study are available in NCBI GeneBank at (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/). These data were derived from the following resources available in the public domain in Clarivate Web of Science (https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/solutions/web-of-science/), PubMed Central (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/), ISI Web of Knowledge (www.webofknowledge.com), and Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/).

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AS and SB contributed by carrying out investigation, data curation, formal analysis and writing original draft. LR contributed to conceptualization, methodology, overall supervision, fund acquisition and writing original draft and revising it. All authors read and approved the final version.

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Senapati, A., Basak, S. & Rangan, L. A Review on Application of DNA Barcoding Technology for Rapid Molecular Diagnostics of Adulterants in Herbal Medicine. Drug Saf 45, 193–213 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40264-021-01133-4

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