Non-targeted HPTLC Fingerprint Profiling for Swift Authentication of <i>trikatu churna</i> Coupled with Chemometric Methods

"Trikatu churna," very famous herbal formulation which is widely used and prescribed for various disease conditions like hypothyroidism, hyperlipidaemia, atherosclerosis and others. It is having well proven anti-inflammatory, hepatoprotective and anthelmintic activities. The preliminary issues in quality of trikatu churna arise due to numerous factors like replacement, omission and adulteration in key ingredients of trikatu churna with spurious alike ingredients. A novel, simple, swift, precise, robust, non-destructive and non-targeted method based on High Performance Thin layer chromatography (HPTLC) coupled with multicomponent analysis was developed to appraise the quality of the samples of trikatu churna. Ten market samples and one standardized in-house sample was used for quality evaluation. Three in house samples were also prepared by deliberately omitting one key ingredient in each. Various chemometrics methods like Principal Component Analysis, and Cluster Analysis based on Hierarchy for further analysis to evaluate the differences in market samples of trikatu churna. Thus, developed method can be used as an effectual and applied approach for quality assessment of trikatu churna.