ABSTRACT
The quality control of plant products is a general requirement to be fulfilled if a plant product is to be released in a market as a drug constituent. However, since the synthetic drugs are subject to severe quality control, the plant products must also comply with the same quality standards. The chemical analysis of plant extracts is very important in quality control. The equipment necessary for plant extract control consists mainly of chromatographic instrumentation. The quality of the plant extract can be given as a "fingerprint" chromatogram in the case the active ingredients are not known or too complex. The quality of the final separation done by Gas chromatography (GC) or High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methods greatly depend upon a prefractionation carried out on the crude plant extract. For quantitative purposes there are available reliable and efficient densitometers which make separation technique compatible with GC and HPLC.
