The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has developed a new method to rapidly authenticate Chinese herbal medicines. Conventionally, fingerprint chromatography is adopted to authenticate and differentiate the species, as it can provide comprehensive chemical composition of a sample. However, it is a labor-intensive and time-consuming method which takes several hours. The researchers’ new technique is based on direct ionization mass spectrometry (DI-MS). The new method takes 10 minutes to analyze one raw sample, authenticate species, classify wild types and cultivated types, as well as differentiate between geographical origins. This method could be applied to other herbal medicines.
Source : www.phys.org