The nonprofit organizations American Botanical Council (ABC), American Herbal Pharmacopoeia (AHP), and the ABC-AHP-NCNPR Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program (BAPP) announced the establishment of a joint partnership with the Sweden-based International Association for the Advancement of High Performance Thin Layer Chromatography (HPTLC Association). The partnership involved the signing of memorandums of understanding which will allow members of ABC, AHP, and users of the BAPP website to gain free access to research, analytical, and educational electronic content owned by the HPTLC Association. This includes information of its HPTLC analytical method collection, which contains 285 different entries for herbal ingredients. The three nonprofit organizations will be listed as partners on the HPTLC Association website.
 
The HPTLC Association, founded in 2012, is an international nonprofit association with more than 100 members from 18 countries, which promotes the use of HPTLC in plant material analysis, and other fields. The organization brings together researchers from academia, regulatory, industry, and standard-setting bodies, to contribute to improving quality control of herbs and herbal supplements. The association’s goals include developing and validating analytical standards for plants and plant materials, and their known adulterants, to serve as a worldwide resourced for information of HPTLC.
 
“It gives the HPTLC Association’s Board of Directors, and in particular those of us residing in North America, great pleasure to formalize our long collaboration and friendship with the American Botanical Council, the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia, and their partner at the University of Mississippi’s National Center for Natural Products Research,” Maged Sharaf, PhD, HPTLC Association board member and chair of the Method Review Committee and the North American Chapter, said. “We are certain that this mutually beneficial partnership will further promote ABC’s vision of the public making ‘educated, responsible choices about herbal medicine as an accepted part of healthcare,’ which is analogous to one of the HPTLC Association’s missions.”
 
One highlight of the association’s work includes the HPTLC Atlas, an online compendium with HPTLC fingerprints from plant species, and the differences brought on by various growing conditions. This resource allows laboratory analysts to compare the chemical variability of plants from different geographical areas. The atlas also provides fingerprints for adulterants as a means to help quality control personnel in the botanical supply chain to authenticate herbal ingredients.
 
Additionally, the atlas contains HPTLC illustrations of botanically authenticated reference samples, and specifications for each botanical item from multiple international pharmacopoeias and reference publications. The atlas is also valuable to academic research and government regulatory agencies.
 
“We are deeply grateful for this excellent collaboration with our friends at the HPTLC Association who have generously made their high-quality analytical resources available to botanical ingredient quality control personnel on an international basis,” Mark Blumenthal, founder and executive director of ABC and director of BAPP, said. “The vast range of HPTLC fingerprints will no doubt assist botanical industry members on a global scale in ensuring that plant materials being proposed for use as ingredients for consumer botanical health products are authentic and free from non-disclosed adulterants that are sometimes added to botanical ingredients by unscrupulous producers and sellers of fraudulent materials.”
 
“We are pleased to feature the contributions of the HPTLC Association intended to help AHP members in their herbal authentication work,” Roy Upton, AHP president, said. “AHP was a founding member of the HPTLC Association and has supported the development of numerous methods featured in the Association’s Method Collection. AHP believes that HPTLC is one of the most versatile and cost-effective techniques for chemical profiling and identification of plants that is of enormous value to industry and academics. AHP continues to work with the Association in developing new methods. A number of the Association methods were developed for AHP monographs.”
 
Stefan Gafner, PhD, ABC chief science officer and technical director of BAPP, expressed similar enthusiasm regarding the partnership.
 
“Having a database, such as the HPTLC Atlas, with fingerprints of botanical ingredients grown in many areas around the globe is very useful, constructive, and compelling, as analysts and researchers will be able to see minor differences in an HPTLC trace depending on where the plant is grown. Making the Atlas’ information widely available will certainly be beneficial to the industry-based ABC and AHP members, as well as the herbal industry and the botanical ingredient analysis community at large.”