Round table conference organised on ‘A World Atlas of HPTLC Fingerprints of Herbs’
AOAC – HPTLC Association recently organised a deminar in New Delhi on ‘State of Art – HP-TLC.’ The event sponsored by Anchrom had 50 invitees.
Dr Bhaskar, Advisor (QA), FSSAI was the keynote speaker. Dr Eike Reich, President, The International Association for the Advancement of ‘High Performance Thin layer Chromatography’, an NGO from Switzerland was the main speaker. Other speakers included Dr Ranjan Mitra, President of AOAC (India Section), and Dr Pranav Nagarnaik, Secretary, AOAC – India section and Akshay Charegaonkar, Director, Anchrom.
Among the dignitaries present were Prof SS Handa, Dr Joseph, Director, HPL, Dr Ravinder Singh, Director, PLIM, Dr Joshi, Chairman, Ayurveda Pharmacopoeia Committee and Dr Neeraj Tandon, ICMR and Dr Amit Agrawal, Director, Natural Remedies.
Dr Bhaskar highlighted his experience with TLC since decades and glad about its modernisation. Dr Reich made a detailed presentation of HP-TLC, as it is practiced internationally i.e. the modern instrumentation must be coupled with modern methodology in order to be a mature technique for reliable results. The audience was quite excited by the information as well as a demonstration of some of Camag’s products.
A round table conference was also held by ‘HP-TLC Association.’ The participants were a select few senior most government officials and scientists from the herbal and food industry.
Dr Reich made a proposal that ‘A World Atlas of HP-TLC Fingerprints of Herbs i.e. their extracts’ be created and put on the Internet for free use by one and all. HP-TLC fingerprint i.e phytochemical composition of an extract represented in the form of a photographic image is the official method worldwide for the identification of materials of botanical origin.
The need of such an Atlas is felt because, by the same common name, people in same or different countries refer to botanical materials that are used in their locality or country e.g. there are several of varieties of ‘ginger’, all of which may have different HP-TLC fingerprints, yet each is genuine. The proposed Atlas would carry fingerprints of all such genuine varieties known worldwide, thereby taking into consideration, the diversity of herbal resources. A fingerprint not matching with its claimed source would be a case of misleading or adulteration. A matching fingerprint but less in intensity would amount to dilution.