Application of Molecular Techniques in Quality Control of Drugs of Natural Origin; A Review

Pharmacognosy is a long established pharmaceutical science, which played a diverse role in the discovery, characterization, production and standardization of drugs. Molecular pharmacognosy using molecular biological tools has extended the scope of pharmacognostical science and plays an important role in the safe and efficient usage of crude drugs. So, these crude drugs are required to be authenticated. DNA Molecular profiling is an additional tool for quality control of herbal drugs as DNA is more basic component of living organisms, whereas chemical and phenotypic expression is controlled by arrangement and expression of genes in the DNA”. This novel approach has several significant advantages over morphological and chemical methods. It is possible to use DNA based identification methods to identify species and different constituents of an herbal medicines and transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics based methods for the functional analysis of key genes involved in synthesis of desired medicinal materials. It serves as a complementary tool to standardization of drugs.