Chromatography Techniques

Chromatography-HPLC in Bioinformatics & Computational

Fingerprinting is a quality control model that builds upon spectroscopic and chromatographic technology. It is different from the traditional quality control model in the sense that fingerprinting looks at the “complete information” or comprehensiveness of the chromatograph, and displays integrated quality information. Since the secondary metabolites, which are chemical components of medicinal herbs, are inherently unstable, the fingerprints of these chemicals possess a fuzziness that cannot be precisely measured, just like the fuzzy phenomenon in our daily lives. Comprehensiveness and fuzziness are the two basic traits of a fingerprint. The similarity of fingerprints is established through these basic traits. Fingerprint analysis focuses on accurate identification (of similar peaks), and not on precise calculation. The comparison of fingerprints emphasizes similarity and the fingerprints compared do not need to be exactly the same. When it is impossible to find out all the complex components of a traditional medicine, fingerprints can be used to check the stability of the intrinsic quality of the medicine. HPLC techniques are applied for purification and separation of various biological samples. The analysed samples are subjected to sequencing studies either manually or using different software’s. This is studied as Data mining and sequence analysis. HPLC is also used for characterization of various metabolites.