Abstract

Medicinal plants have found immense use in drug discovery over the years as several chemically available drugs today are either directly from plant secondary metabolites or have their templates from such. Recent advances in the application of bioassay-coupled chromatographic analysis of plant extracts have led to reliable characterization of unknown samples with regards to their activity profile as well as the compounds responsible for observed activity. This paper reviews the progress made in the field of bioassay-chromatography hyphenated techniques for natural products analysis, notably medicinal plants. Different bioassays including microbial, biochemical, micro-chemical and cell based assays as well as several chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques such as Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC), High Performance Thin Layer Chromatography (HPTLC), Liquid Chromatography (LC), Over-Pressured Layer Chromatography (OPLC), Gas Chromatography (GC), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), Fourier Transform Infra-red (FTIR) spectroscopy, Mass Spectrometry (MS), Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS), Diffuse Reflectance Infrared Fourier Transform (DRIFT), etc. are discussed in this paper.

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