Volume 18

January-March 2026​

Chromatographic Techniques for Flavonoids

Pallavi Chiprikar and Ashish Runthala

Abstract: 
Flavonoids are a diverse group of polyphenolic compounds widely distributed in plants and possess significant pharmacological and nutraceutical value. Accurate identification, quantification, and structural elucidation of flavonoids are essential for quality control, chemotaxonomy, and bioactivity studies. The focus of this review is to provide an overview of various chromatographic techniques used for the analysis of flavonoids, including TLC, HPTLC, HPLC, UPLC, GC, and their hyphenated mass spectrometric methods. Thin-layer chromatography (TLC) and high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC) remain powerful, cost-effective tools for preliminary screening, fingerprinting, and semi-quantitative analysis, enhanced by visualization reagents and densitometry. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) serves as a widely applied method for precise qualitative and quantitative profiling, while ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) improves resolution, sensitivity, and speed, especially for complex flavonoid mixtures. Advanced hyphenated techniques, such as LC-MS/MS, UPLC-QTOF-MS, HPTLC-MS, and GC-MS (after derivatization), enable confirmation of the structures by molecular mass and fragmentation patterns, thus providing support for comprehensive metabolomic characterization. Collectively, modern chromatographic and mass spectrometric platforms offer robust, sensitive, and reproducible analytical workflows that are essential for standardization, authentication, and in-depth investigation of flavonoid-rich botanical materials.

Keywords: Flavonoids, Chromatography, TLC, HPTLC, HPLC.

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