Non-Targeted Analytical Technology in Herbal Medicines: Applications, Challenges, and Perspectives

Abstract

Herbal medicines (HMs) have been utilized to prevent and treat human ailments for thousands of years. Especially, HMs have recently played a crucial role in the treatment of COVID-19 in China. However, HMs are susceptible to various factors during harvesting, processing, and marketing, affecting their clinical efficacy. Therefore, it is necessary to conclude a rapid and effective method to study HMs so that they can be used in the clinical setting with maximum medicinal value. Non-targeted analytical technology is a reliable analytical method for studying HMs because of its unique advantages in analyzing unknown components. Based on the extensive literature, the paper summarizes the benefits, limitations, and applicability of non-targeted analytical technology. Moreover, the article describes the application of non-targeted analytical technology in HMs from four aspects: structure analysis, authentication, real-time monitoring, and quality assessment. Finally, the review has prospected the development trend and challenges of non-targeted analytical technology. It can assist HMs industry researchers and engineers select non-targeted analytical technology to analyze HMs’ quality and authenticity.

Keywords:

• Applications
• chemometrics
• herbal medicines (HMs)
• non-targeted analytical technology

Disclosure statement

All authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number: 31860584), and the supported by Special Program for the Major Science and Technology Projects of Yunnan Province (Grant number: 202202AE090001), China.