117828198

2 M. Sajewicz et al.

Introduction

Identification of plant species and varieties can be performed by a variety of methods. The oldest are macroscopic investigations, then microscopic and microchemical methods [1]. Very often these methods are insufficient for precise identification of plant materiał, because of the similarities of differ-ent species. Modem analytical methods have recently enabled chemotax-onomic classification of species.

Plant drugs are freąuently offered in pulverized or homogenized form, sometimes as succuses, juices, and extracts, often as pills or capsules. Die-tary supplements, nutraceuticals, traditional Chinese medicines, or Ayur-vedic drugs are only a few from among a great diversity of commercially available phytopharmaceuticals. Botanicals are believed to be very safe and at the same time not very effective drugs, yet nothing could be less true than this statement. When overdosed or not pro perły prepared, many herbal medicines cause severe side effects. The recent global resurgence of interest in herbal medicines has led to an increased demand for these prepa-rations, which has resulted in a decline in ąuality. The current need is to es-tablish a systematic approach to standardization of herbal raw materials and herbal formulations and to develop well-designed methods for this purpose [2]. A variety of methods can be used for phytochemical standardization of herbal raw materials and polyherbal formulations, for example preliminary phytochemical screening, fingerprint profiling, and quantifica-tion of marker compounds.

By analogy with genomics or proteomics, the study of small-molecule metabolite profiles is called metabolomics [3], where 'metabolome' denotes the complete set of small-molecule metabolites (for example metabolic in-termediates, hormones and other signalling molecules, and the secondary metabolites) found in a biological sample, for example a single organism [4]. Metabolomic approaches are under dynamie development and several synonyms have been suggested, for example metabonomics [5], metabolite profiling [6], or fingerprinting [7-9].

Among a variety of quality-control methods applied to herbal materials, chromatographic fingerprinting has recently attracted morę attention, especially because of the lack of authentic standard substances for Identification of the active components [10]. A chromatographic fingerprint is a chromatogram that represents the Chemical characteristics of a herbal medi-cine [11].

Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS)-based metabolomic profiling methods have been developed and used for profiling of plant metabolites sińce the 1980s, yet in the course of the past few years only has this