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Chinese Medicine
Published in: Chinese Medicine 1/2019

Open Access 01-12-2019 | Research

Application of delayed luminescence measurements for the identification of herbal materials: a step toward rapid quality control

Authors: Mengmeng Sun, Shengpeng Wang, Yong Jing, Li Li, Min He, Yusheng Jia, Eduard van Wijk, Yitao Wang, Zhihong Wang, Mei Wang

Published in: Chinese Medicine | Issue 1/2019

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Abstract

Background

Herbal materials are widely used as medicinal products, dietary supplements, food, and spices. With increased consumption, the safety, quality, and efficacy of herbal materials are becoming more relevant. The authenticity of herbal materials plays an important role in herbal quality control, and there is an urgent need to develop a simple, direct, objective, rapid, and inexpensive measurement tool for the identification of herbal materials for the purpose of quality control.

Methods

Delayed luminescence (DL) was used to measure authentic and counterfeit herbal materials. A hyperbolic function was used to extract four properties from the DL curves of the herbal materials. Statistical tools, including Student’s t test and Principal Component Analysis, were used to differentiate authentic and counterfeit herbal materials based on the DL properties.

Results

Our results showed that authentic and counterfeit herbal materials could be identified based on the DL properties as follows: (a) authentic versus counterfeit materials; (b) authentic versus adulterated materials; (c) authentic versus sulfur-fumigated materials; as well as (d) authentic versus dyed materials.

Conclusion

The simple, direct, rapid, and inexpensive measurements offered by DL potentially offer a novel technique for the identification of Chinese herbal materials. However, the establishment of a valid database will be the next step toward the possible application of this technique, which would contribute significantly to the development of a novel digital tool for the quality control of herbal materials.
Appendix
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Metadata
Title
Application of delayed luminescence measurements for the identification of herbal materials: a step toward rapid quality control
Authors
Mengmeng Sun
Shengpeng Wang
Yong Jing
Li Li
Min He
Yusheng Jia
Eduard van Wijk
Yitao Wang
Zhihong Wang
Mei Wang
Publication date
01-12-2019
Publisher
BioMed Central
Published in
Chinese Medicine / Issue 1/2019
Electronic ISSN: 1749-8546
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13020-019-0269-2

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