Recent global acceptance and renewed interest toward plant-derived drugs, nutraceuticals, and other natural products, has generated a lot of commercial as well as research activity in phytochemistry. Earliest drug discoveries made possible by random sampling of higher plants, used simpler operations for the separation, purification, and identification of phytoconstituents. Further, research developments with the introduction of chromatographic, spectroscopic, and high throughput screening techniques have enabled beneficial amalgamation of organic chemistry, phytochemistry, pharmacology, and analytical instrumentation. Today phytochemical analysis has advanced to the level of making compound characterizations possible with even tiny fractions of phytoisolates. Direct identification of phytoconstituents from fresh plant parts, extracts, essential oils, and formulations is a straightforward task. However, phytochemical analysis for the isolation and purification of plant active constituents is still a challenging issue because plant drugs are constituted of an enormous variety of organic substances of complex chemical nature. The range and number of discrete molecular structures produced by plants is vast. While molecules of plant primary metabolism are of universal distribution, plant secondary metabolites are of more limited distribution within restricted taxonomic groups, and are of greater therapeutic interest due to their unique physiological effects.

One of the greatest challenges facing phytopharmacological research is the identification of exact active constituents of therapeutically effective polyconstituent plant drugs of alternative or traditional medicine streams. Attempts at isolations have often resulted in frustration due to the loss of activity resulting in compounds of lesser or no activity in comparison to that of multi-constituent plant drugs. Extraction and isolation procedures need to be carefully monitored at each stage to follow the active constituent being isolated. It is found that, with many time-tested and therapeutically efficacious traditional drugs, the activity is not attributable to a single chemical constituent. The observed biological effect could be a synergistic phenomenon resulting from the multipharmacological effects of the complex chemical profile of the drug.

Once active metabolites are successfully identified, a wide range of extraction techniques are available for the isolation of different classes of phytoconstituents.

Equipped with sophisticated separation techniques, current phytochemical analysis is concerned with the development of:

• Techniques to identify classes of bioactive compounds in plant tissues/extracts/herbal recipes prior to their isolation
• Methods and tools for the isolation of such active constituents without much loss of activity
• Analytical techniques to standardize polyconstituent herbals
• Procedures for estimation of heavy metals, pesticides, and other contaminants in plant drugs.