ABSTRACT
Plants and extracts there of have been used in traditional medicine for the treatment of various diseases for centuries all over the world, besides their use in food and cosmetics. In fact, already in the ancient world, the use of plant extracts as a kind of medicinal therapy was described. Nowadays they are still indispensable in various countries with no or only limited access to Western medicine due to the lack of commercially available drugs. The interest in characterizing and isolating bioactive constituents of plant extracts for the development of new medicines in the ght against various diseases like malaria and in the search for new antibiotics is increasing again and displays a huge potential with a large business market. For this reason, the analytic techniques used for the characterization of plant constituents-for example, in the quality control of herbal medicinal products as well as in the segment of high-priced food products-have moved into the spotlight. Due to the complexity of primary and secondary metabolites present in plants, new ground has to be broken in the development of sophisticated analytical approaches and tools, which presents a major challenge with respect to the analytical point of view. In particular, the composition of complex plant matrices asks for adequate methodologies like mass spectrometry (MS).
