On Problems of the Comprehensive Chemical Profiling of Medicinal Plants

The interest in and attention to herbal therapy rise in Russia every year, which is in agreement with the worldwide tendency. Support for the increasing demand inescapably leads to the appearance of the herbal products with low quality and efficacy, and sometimes to the total falsification of plant material and preparations based on it. Therefore, one of the important problems in medicine, biomedicine, pharmacognosy and phytochemistry is the pharmaceutical safety and quality of plant materials, plant preparations and herbal drugs. Modern methodological approaches to the solution of such problems, the different concepts of identification, evaluation of authenticity and quality control of herbal drugs using markers of different types and the instrumental methods of chromatographic profiling (one of the methods of metabolic investigations) of herbal compositions, the spectral and the combined spectral chromatographic methods used for solving these problems, the problems of the standardization of plant materials, the preparations and drugs based on it, the world experience in solving problems of the quality evaluation of plant materials and herbal products, and the state of research in Russia are observed in this review.