Development of screening methods by innovative spectroscopy techniques and chemometrics in research of herbal medicine

Herbal medicine has been used world wide for more than hundreds of years as one of the most traditional forms of health care. The chemical composition of herbs may vary depending on the species, location of growth, age, harvesting season, drying conditions, and other conditions. Herbal drugs, products and substances intended for health purposes must meet a number of specific requirements which are to guarantee their medical efficacy and safety for human health. To enhance the quality, and to ensure the reliability of pharmacological and clinical research, while also guaranteeing the consistency of the final product quality, the determination of all bioactive constituents of a herbal material is necessary . Therefore, comprehensive studies of effective analytical methods are required to make the quality control quick and reliable so that at any stage of the production process, it is possible to obtain feedback. The proposed project will certainly provide a significant contribution to the investigation of rapid and reliable techniques, like innovative spectroscopy methods (cantilever enhanced FTIR PAS, Raman SERS, LIBS) in combination with statistical data analyses (HCA, PCA, ANN), which can be exploited as routine diagnostic tools for herbal medicine analysis without special, or with just minimal, sample preparation.