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Authentication of traditional Chinese medicine using infrared spectroscopy: distinguishing between ginseng and its morphological fakes

  • Published:
Journal of Biomedical Science

Abstract

The quality of pharmaceutical products such as ginseng is important for ensuring consumer safety and efficacy. Ginseng is an expensive herb, and adulteration with other cheaper products may occur. Quality assurance of ginseng is needed since many of its commercial products now come in various formulations such as capsules, powder, softgels and tea. Thus traditional means of authentication via smell, taste or physical appearance are hardly reliable. Herbs like ginseng tend to exhibit characteristic infrared fingerprints due to their different chemical constituents. Here we report for the first time a rapid means of distinguishing American and Asian ginsengs from two morphological fakes – sawdust and Platycodon grandiflorum, via pattern differences and principal component analysis of their infrared spectra. Our results show that ginseng can be distinguished from both sawdust and Platycodon grandiflorum, hence there is a potential of using infrared spectroscopy as a novel analytical technique in the authentication of ginseng.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Mr. Ranjit Viswanathan (Sales Manager, CAMO Software India Pvt. Ltd.) who permitted the download of ‘The Unscrambler® 9.2′ software evaluation version for analysis of our data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biosensors Group, Biomedical Engineering Research Centre, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Drive, Research Techno Plaza, XFrontiers Block, Level 6, Singapore, 637553, Singapore

    Kevin Yi-Lwern Yap & Chu Sing Lim

  2. Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Science, National University of Singapore, 18 Science Drive 4, Singapore, 117543, Singapore

    Sui Yung Chan

  3. School of Chemical & Biomedical Engineering, Block N1.3-B3-11, 70 Nanyang Drive, Singapore, 637457, Singapore

    Chu Sing Lim

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  1. Kevin Yi-Lwern Yap
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  2. Sui Yung Chan
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  3. Chu Sing Lim
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Correspondence to Chu Sing Lim.

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Yap, K.YL., Chan, S.Y. & Lim, C.S. Authentication of traditional Chinese medicine using infrared spectroscopy: distinguishing between ginseng and its morphological fakes. J Biomed Sci 14, 265–273 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11373-006-9133-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11373-006-9133-3

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