Comment · Thu, April 8, 2021 · Natrium Health & Nootropics Depot
Bacopa Monnieri potency testing varies in quality. The wiki should probably guide users to dose depending on each product's test methodology.
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post in this thread.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Natrium Health & Nootropics Depot
It's been something I have been fighting for over 5 years. Customers see brands claiming 55%, but they are nowhere near that with accurate methods. How UV-VIS ever was the standard for assay of actives in botanicals is beyond me. It's the most garbage chemistry if you know what you are looking at. EVERYTHING has different response factors on a UV detector, so even if you use chromatographic separation, you STILL can't accurately know the content without a reference standard to calculate it. Take away the chromatographic separation altogether, like with UV-VIS, and you get literally the dumbest way to assay the content of complex matrices. The only accurate way to assay the content of complex botanical matrices is using chromatographic separation, like HPLC/UPLC/HPTLC, then using qualified reference materials to create calibration curves for each specific active. On top of that, you must validate your methods using spike recovery analyses to ensure the methods are accurate across the range of mixtures and ratios that you will find in the plant extract. Your methods might only be accurate at certain concentrations. If you don't validate them, you might have very tight method uncertainty at 25% concentration, but very high uncertainty at 2% concentration.
I'm not even going to get into the more complex issue of monographs, and what people mean by bacopasides. People just think total bacopasides is a standard thing, but it is not. You have to choose which specific actives you define as bacopasides, then set your STAG for testing it. One lab's STAG might be totally different than another. You could have one lab looking at 4 bacopasides, while another is looking at 6 or 8.