Quality control of herbal material and phytopharmaceuticals with MS and NMR based metabolic fingerprinting.

Metabolic fingerprinting techniques have received a lot of attention in recent years and the annual amount of publications in this field has increased significantly over the past decade. This increase in publications is due to improvements in the analytical performance, most notably in the field of NMR and MS analysis, and the increased awareness of the different applications of this growing field. Metabolomic fingerprinting or profiling is continuously being applied to new areas of research such as drug discovery from natural resources, quality control of herbal material, and discovering lead compounds. In this review the current state of the art of metabolic fingerprinting, focussing on NMR and MS technologies will be discussed. The application of these two analytical tools in the quality control of herbal material and phytopharmaceuticals forms the major part of this review. Finally we will look at the future developments and perspectives of these two technologies in the quality control of herbal material.