| dc.description.abstract | Herbal medicines including the scholarly Bhutanese Sowa Rigpa medicine (BSM) contribute significantly to
primary health care services and play a considerable part in modern drug discovery. BSM, which was integrated
with modern health care system in 1967, currently uses more than 200 species of medicinal plants including
three closely related members of the Corydalis species; Corydalis calliantha, C. crispa, and C. dubia. Maintaining
the quality of these medicinal plants has been always challenging due to adulterants and also due to lack of
traditional quality control parameters that could distinguish closely related species. Therefore there is an urgent
need to develop reliable analytical methods and quality parameters. Given the significant medicinal properties
attributed to the three Corydalis species which are extensively used in BSM, a thorough literature review was
performed to investigate their existing quality control parameters including: 1) morphological assessment, 2)
habitat and ecological evaluation, 3) macroscopical and microscopical examination, 4) physiochemical limit
setting and comparative high-performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC) profiling, and 5) phytochemical
and biological activities. The study revealed that there are distinct species-specific features including ecological
adaptation, micromorphology, anatomy, phytochemical values and HPTLC profiles presented by each Corydalis
species, and that these quality parameters support traditional quality screening processes in BSM | en_US |
