Application of Gas Chromatography and Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry in Quality Control of Chinese Medicines

Gas chromatography (GC) is a well-known and widely employed technique for separation and analysis of the gaseous and volatile components. Modern GC technique was firstly invented by James and Martin in 1952 and applied for the separation of amino acids. After decades of development, GC has large number of applications in a variety of fields due to its high efficiency and great sensitivity, especially for the research of Chinese herbal medicine including the determination and characterization of bioactive compounds such as volatile oils, fingerprint analysis of holistic quality control, pharmacokinetics research and metabolomics analysis. In addition, GC and GC-MS have also been adopted and are now used for an increasingly growing list of applications in other various fields, such as environmental analysis, food and beverage analysis and so on.