Chemical information of Chinese medicines: A challenge to chemist

Fingerprint is a broad term. Different approaches are employed in developing fingerprints to characterize systems with complicated compositions. In this review, these approaches are grouped as "component based approaches" and "all-information based approaches" according to nature of the information used. Comments and discussions are given on the "component based approaches" including the commonly used "marker approach" and the "multi-component approach" as well as the "pattern approach" and the "multi-pattern approach" as categorized under "all-information based approaches". The pattern approach is embraced in China and establishment of fingerprint of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) herbs and preparations is currently undergoing. A brief review of current activities is given. Several chemometrics techniques mainly developed by us and our collaborators are described. They have been applied in developing the TCM fingerprint with very good results. These demonstrated the power of these techniques, especially when coupled with hyphenated instrument, in retrieving useful chemical information from huge amount of data generated experimentally.