Omics: A Newer Technique in Herbal Drug Standardization and Quantification

Herbal plants are found abundant in all parts of the world with various uses for its medicinal, pharmaceutical, and nutritional value as well as the ordinary spice in our culinary. Nature is a principal source of herbal medicines. The increasing use of herbal medicine around the globe requires new scientific approaches for their standardization. Evaluation of Physical and chemical parameters are the most common parameters for standardization. Now days, a number of method exists, but not satisfying everyone all over the globe. With the use of newer technique such as omics, (proteomics, metabonomics, transcriptomics etc.), we can easily have depth knowledge of pharmacodyanamics, pharmacokinetics and toxicological characterization of active constituent of an herbal plant. These techniques have made one standard approach for the standardization and modernization of herbal medicine. The modernization of herbal medicine is the need of hour to cater the global demand by means of patient compatibility. The omic technique can also play an important role for the conservation of knowledge of ancient plant species. Moreover omic technique is an important tool for fingerprinting and quality control of herbal medicine. In this review, an emphasis has been made on different techniques of omics and their use in standardization and modernization of herbal plant.