DNA barcoding detects contamination and substitution in North American herbal products

open access

Conclusions:

Most of the herbal products tested were of poor quality, including considerable product substitution, contamination and use of fillers. These activities dilute the effectiveness of otherwise useful remedies, lowering the perceived value of all related products because of a lack of consumer confidence in them. We suggest that the herbal industry should embrace DNA barcoding for authenticating herbal products through testing of raw materials used in manufacturing products. The use of an SRM DNA herbal barcode library for testing bulk materials could

provide a method for best practices in the manufacturing of herbal products.This would provide consumers with safe, high quality herbal products.

Table 1 DNA barcode results listed for individual samples from blind testing of the 44 herbal products and 50 herbal

leaf samples representing 42 medicinal species of plan

Figure 3

DNA barcode results from blind testing of the 44 herbal products representing 12 companies (fillers, substitutions, contaminents, authentic)