Indian Herbal Drug Microscopy

Adulteration and misidentification of herbal drugs can cause serious health problems to consumers, as well as publicity and legal headaches for the pharmaceutical industry. The past decade has witnessed the introduction and institution of new Good Manufacturing Practices in quality control of raw materials, intermediates, and finished products of botanical origin.§The first step in quality control of medicinal plants is ensuring the authenticity of the desired species for the intended use. The quality control can be conducted via a variety of techniques, namely macro and microscopic identification and chemical analysis. Microanatomy sometimes provides information that gross anatomy does not. The powdered crude drugs can be identified based on the form, the presence or absence of different cell types based on their cytomorphological characters (e.g., parenchyma, collenchyma, fibers, stone cells, vessels, trichomes, secretory cells, epidermal cells).§For hundreds of years, the magnifying glass and the microscope were the only possible method for the analytical evaluation of herbal drugs. Advances in microscope technology and improvements in light and scanning electron microscopes have improved the accuracy and capabilities of microscopy as a means of botanical identification. In addition microscopic identification involves the comparative analysis of broken and powdered herbal products.§The botanical control by microscopic examinations, using histological identification, can be used as a rapid and inexpensive identification technique, but a limited number of standard references in libraries are available for comparison.§The present work summarizes today s knowledge of some important botanical microscopic characters of the whole, fragmented, and powdered herbal drugs studied. These quality standards might be incorporated within a certification program and included in future quality control monographs, so that source countries and researchers around the world can derive greater accuracy of identification.§