QAMS
Today’s kava fact of the day touches on a subject similar to acetonic testing for quality, but with a major difference. This method has been accepted into the Chinese, US, and European Pharmacopoeia as a definitive method of measuring product quality. QAMS stands for “Qualitative and quantitative analysis of multi-components by single marker methods”. QAMS has played a significant role in the evaluation of quality of botanicals and herbal medicines including Traditional Chinese Medicines. In this instance researchers developed eight different QAMS profiles to assess the kavalactones and flavokavain contents of kava. Researchers used quantitative measurements to verify the validity of the test and it was found to be accurate.
This test is a reliable method that can determine the multi-components in kava simultaneously. Another important difference of this test over others is that in normal HPLC tests you need to have very expensive kavalactone isolates available as reference samples. This test uses benzoic acid as a standard reference instead of kavalactones. It can normally be found in laboratories and isn’t exorbitantly expensive, opening the availability of using this test in labs which may have lacked the capacity in the past.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend to fully understand the implications and applications of this test. It’s quite complicated, or at least it is to me. It’s being used currently to judge the product quality of a number of different traditional medicines, and now kava can be added to that list. The R² value here ranges from 0.998 to 1.000, so it is quite correlated to the data. We can conclude that this method, now applied to kava, will play a very important role in the quality control of kava and other foods or medicinal herbs in the future.
Zhao, Xiaojun, Chao Su, Ruru Ren, Bo Zhang, Yingli Wang, Xiaojuan Su, Fangfang Lu, et al. 2021. “Simultaneous Determination of Both Kavalactones and Flavokawains Constituents by Different Single Marker in Kava.” Journal of Separation Science, May.
(https://doi.org/10.1002/jssc.202100198)
Today’s kava fact of the day touches on a subject similar to acetonic testing for quality, but with a major difference. This method has been accepted into the Chinese, US, and European Pharmacopoeia as a definitive method of measuring product quality. QAMS stands for “Qualitative and quantitative analysis of multi-components by single marker methods”. QAMS has played a significant role in the evaluation of quality of botanicals and herbal medicines including Traditional Chinese Medicines. In this instance researchers developed eight different QAMS profiles to assess the kavalactones and flavokavain contents of kava. Researchers used quantitative measurements to verify the validity of the test and it was found to be accurate.
This test is a reliable method that can determine the multi-components in kava simultaneously. Another important difference of this test over others is that in normal HPLC tests you need to have very expensive kavalactone isolates available as reference samples. This test uses benzoic acid as a standard reference instead of kavalactones. It can normally be found in laboratories and isn’t exorbitantly expensive, opening the availability of using this test in labs which may have lacked the capacity in the past.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend to fully understand the implications and applications of this test. It’s quite complicated, or at least it is to me. It’s being used currently to judge the product quality of a number of different traditional medicines, and now kava can be added to that list. The R² value here ranges from 0.998 to 1.000, so it is quite correlated to the data. We can conclude that this method, now applied to kava, will play a very important role in the quality control of kava and other foods or medicinal herbs in the future.
Zhao, Xiaojun, Chao Su, Ruru Ren, Bo Zhang, Yingli Wang, Xiaojuan Su, Fangfang Lu, et al. 2021. “Simultaneous Determination of Both Kavalactones and Flavokawains Constituents by Different Single Marker in Kava.” Journal of Separation Science, May.
(https://doi.org/10.1002/jssc.202100198)