Molecular Identification of Traditional Medicinal Materials

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Abstract

Traditional medicines are consumed by 80% of the population in the world for health maintenance and disease treatment. Adulteration and substitution of the source materials have been life-threatening problems growing along with their popularity. Consequently, a reliable identification method is important for safety and quality assurance of the traditional medicinal materials. Molecular techniques provide alternative means to conventional organoleptic and chemical authentication methods and are often more superior in accuracy, sensitivity, resolution and reproducibility. Since the early 1990s, a number of molecular techniques have been developed to identify traditional medicinal materials based on DNA fingerprinting (RFLP, AP-PCR, RAPD, AFLP, DALP, ISSR, PCR-RFLP, SCAR and isothermal amplification), DNA microarray and DNA sequencing (DNA barcoding and FINS). These techniques are capable of differentiating traditional medicinal materials and their adulterants and substitutes, and in some cases, distinguishing closely related species, subspecies, varieties, cultivars and species from different localities. This chapter introduces the major molecular identification techniques and reviews their applications in the identification of animal and botanical medicinal materials.

Keywords

Internal Transcribe Spacer Amplify Fragment Length Polymorphism Aristolochic Acid American Ginseng Medicinal Material 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Suggested Readings

  1. Lou, S. K., Wong, K. L., Li, M., But, P. P. H., Tsui, S. K., & Shaw, P. C. (2010). An integrated web medicinal materials DNA database: MMDBD (Medicinal Materials DNA Barcode Database). BMC Genomics, 11, 402.PubMedCrossRefGoogle Scholar
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  3. Shaw, P. C., Jiang, R. W., Wong, K. L., & But, P. P. H. (2007). Health food and medicine: Combined chemical and molecular technologies for authentication and quality control. In S. E. Ebeler, G. R. Takeoka, & P. Winterhalter (Eds.), Authentication of food and wine. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society.Google Scholar
  4. Shaw, P. C., Wong, K. L., Chan, A. W., Wong, W. C., & But, P. P. H. (2009). Patent applications for using DNA technologies to authenticate medicinal herbal material. Chinese Medicine, 4, 21.PubMedCrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Shanghai Scientific and Technical Publishers and Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China (CUHK), Institute of Chinese MedicineThe Chinese University of Hong KongShatinHong Kong, P.R. China
  2. 2.School of Life SciencesThe Chinese University of Hong KongShatinHong Kong, P.R. China
  3. 3.State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China (CUHK), Institute of Chinese Medicine, and School of Life Sciences, Rm. 180, Science CentreThe Chinese University of Hong KongShatinHong Kong, P.R. China

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