Isolation, characterization and identification of bioactive compounds from Herbal Medicines and Medicinal Plant Extracts by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy: A brief review

Herbal medicines are mostly used from thousands of years in primary health care of society and community of both developed and developing countries. It mainly includes whole plant, herbs, extracts, isolated compounds, polyherbal preparations, phytoformulations etc. Identification of bioactive compounds from phytomedicines plays a very important role in drug development and drug design process. The characterization of phytomedicines is very much essential in the identification of compounds. For the purpose of identification two methods, Spectroscopy and Chromatography play important role. Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) is the widely used technique which is mainly used to identify functional groups in herbal medicines. Various scientific research articles published on extraction, isolation, characterization and identification of phytoconstituents from medicinal plants and other forms of herbal medicines is being reviewed in this article. We have mainly focused on the FTIR characterization and identification of phytochemicals from herbal medicines and are briefly presented in this review work. Our present review article concludes that the FTIR spectroscopy plays very much essential role in the identification and characterization of bioactive compounds from herbal medicines