The Application of Electrochemical Oscillation Methods for Identification of Traditional Chinese Medicine Materials

Abstract

Electrochemical oscillation reflects the overall characteristics of the system under test in terms of redox activity. It has proven to be advantageous in analyzing and processing complex components of herbal systems, such as polysaccharides and proteins. Therefore, it is widely used in the quantitative or qualitative tests of traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) for identification and quality control. Electrochemical oscillation has several advantages such as high sensitivity, stability and micro sample requirement. Compared with other traditional methods, the interaction of multi-component in the TCMs was taken into account, which provides new ideas for the search of TCMs. Here, we presented a brief introduction on the progress on the topic, which promoted the development of electrochemical oscillation and the standardization of TCMs in the last twenty years. Electrochemical oscillation method is cheap, sensitive, fast, stable and convenient for the identification and quality control of TCMs. Reaction systems and the visualization of the fingerprints can be improved in the future.