Pharmacognostic Standardization and Phytochemical screening of Leaves of Amaranthus spinosus L.

To ensure reproducible quality of herbal products, proper control of starting material is important. The first step towards ensuring quality of starting material is authentication. thus, in recent years there has been a rapid increase in the standardization of selected medicinal plants of potential therapeutic significance. Despite the modern techniques, identification of plant drugs by pharmacognostic studies is more reliable. Pharmacognostical parameters of the leaves were studied with the aim of drawing the pharmacopoeial standards for this species. Macroscopical and microscopical characters, physico-chemical constants, phytochemical study for the presence of various secondary metabolites and HPTLC fingerprint profile of methanolic extract were studied. The present investigation on Amaranthus spinosus leaf might be useful to supplement information in regard to its identification parameters. Such studies are important in the way of acceptability of herbal drugs in present scenario of lacking regulatory laws to control quality of herbal drugs.