Herbal medicines are emerging as the bliss of the modern era for the
treatment and welfare of the population owing to their safety, and minimum or lack of
side effects. Keeping this perspective in mind, the quality of herbal medicines is
equally important as allopathic medicines. To thwart the adulteration of herbal
medicines with substandard or similar low-grade herbs is the prime objective of
standardization for the maintenance of the quality of herbal medicines. Assessment of
quality and purity of crude drugs using several parameters such as morphological,
microscopical, physical, chemical & biological evaluation can be performed through
standardization technique. A number of conventional standardization methods are
available, but owing to their lackings in one or more aspects, modern standardization
techniques are being opted for by many researchers nowadays. Amid all the novel
standardization techniques, DNA fingerprinting method is the most important in the
quality control of herbal medicines on account of its accuracy and consistency. DNA
fingerprinting defines barcode-like DNA fragment patterns generated by multilocus
probes after the electrophoretic parting of genomic DNA fragments. Hence, this
chapter primarily emphasizes on DNA fingerprinting method as a tool for the
standardization of herbal medicines.
Keywords: Fingerprinting, Herbal drug, Identification, Isolation, Standardization.
