Fingerprints in HPLC, CE and CEC: development, data treatment and extraction of information

All over the world, herbs are used for preventive and therapeutical goals. Therefore, identification and quality control of products of natural origin is required. Determination of a number of active compounds does not allow assessing the total intrinsic quality of herbs. Since 1991 the World Health Organization accepts fingerprint chromatography as identification and quality evaluation technique for medicinal herbs. The project includes three parts: method development, data (pre)treatment and extraction of information. In fingerprint development, the first step in the process is to create general conditions in HPLC, CE and CEC in order to enlarge the peak capacity with an acceptable resolution. Before extraction of relevant information is possible, (pre)treatment of the data can be necessary and depend on the desired information. The goal of fingerprint chromatography is to use it as identification and quality evaluation technique for herbs.