Detection of regulated and prohibited plants in plant food supplements

Plant food supplements, herbal treatments and traditional medicines, bought via internet and intercepted by the authorities are often only screened for the presence of chemical adulterants like sibutramine and analogues in slimming preparations or sildenafil and analogues in potency enhancers. Other underestimated problems with these herbal preparations could also be herbal adulterations and herbal fraud. The first is the intentional presence of regulated or prohibited plants in the preparation, the latter is the absence of the claimed medicinal plant.   In Belgium the OMCL is regularly asked to perform analysis in this context, namely to identify/detect a certain plant in a herbal preparation, composed of a mixture of different plants. For this purpose the OMCL is involved in two projects to tackle this problem. In the first a DNA metabarcoding approach is developed. In short DNA is extracted from the complex mixture, followed by next-generation sequencing and advanced bio-informatics in order to identify all plants present in the mixture. The second project focusses on the use of chromatographic fingerprints and chemometrics in order to recognize the chromatographic profile of the targeted plant in the mixture and classify it as positive or negative for the targeted plant.   For this first topic of the break-out session on herbals, the questions that are presented for discussion are: Are there other OMCLs occupied or interested in the problem of herbal adulteration? Did you receive already questions by courts or inspection in this context? What are the approaches followed in other OMCLs? What kind of analysis are performed on herbal products in your OMCL?