HPTLC fingerprint analysis of plant staminal cell products

Utilization of natural products is radically changing. Changes were mainly due to the outcome in the market of a plethora of new food supplements, and in particular those generally named botanicals for their common plant origin. The validation of these novel products needs powerful analytical devices tailored for the study of herbal extracts in order to assess composition and face their natural complexity as a resource. The last item is important and crucial for the capacity and utility of the analytical results that means that each product should be analyzed with the right approach. Having in mind these arguments, we selected HPTLC as useful tool for the analysis of products based on plant staminal (stem) cells. Nowadays these products, generally named bud-derivatives, are waiting scientific validation to obtain their own place into food supplements regulation, after gained that in the market. Our analyses, based on HPTLC fingerprints, were able to show bud-derivatives complex compositions that resulted very similar, but also in part different, to those of the corresponding leaf hydro-alcoholic extract.