Committed to Collaborative Research and Development

ISURA is proud to collaborate on research projects with other organizations such as the National Research Council of Canada. Scroll down to learn more about ISURA’s uARM – User Authenticated Reference Material project and it’s most recent partnership project to evaluate several analytical methods to identify and authenticate functional ingredients for the NHP industry.

Botanical Reference Standards Projects – uARM

ISURA has initiated uARM – User Authenticated Reference Material project as an outcome of a collaborative research project with the National Research Council of Canada. uARM provides reliable reference materials for Natural Health Products that enable and facilitate scientific research for areas of investigation such as botanical ingredient authentication, chemical barcoding research and DNA barcoding. A key component of the project is a commitment to “open source” raw data for researchers – ISURA is developing an online collaboration platform to share such data.

• uARM materials are available at low cost to researchers ($25/reference standard sample) and users will share data collected on the samples
• ISURA will collect and provide full analytical data sets, including complete chloroplast DNA sequence
• Multiple samples of the same species from different commercial sources and locations will be available
• Available for chemical barcoding for species confirmation and/or source (country) verification
• Open source datasets encourage data sharing and new approaches

Available Botanical Reference Standards

• Agrimonia eupatoria (agrimony)
• Echinacea purpurea (purple coneflower)
• Hummulus lupulus (hops)
• Urtica dioica (stinging nettle)

ISURA, in collaboration with Technical University of Braunschweig, published an article in the online journal – Plants, on herbal authentication using a combination of chemical and biological test methods. The article showcases ISURA’s capabilities in the areas of morphological identification, HPTLC fingerprinting, advanced mass spectrometry, and DNA sequencing.

The published test methods will help find adulterants undetectable by traditional means such as HPTLC and morphological identification. Furthermore, the data has been submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to prevent future misidentification of horsetail plants through DNA sequencing.

Find the Abstract and full article in Plants 2022, 11(19), 2562, article title:
A Multi-Pronged Technique for Identifying Equisetum palustre and Equisetum arvense—Combining HPTLC, HPLC-ESI-MS/MS and Optimized DNA Barcoding Techniques
Direct Link: https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/11/19/2562

Developing analytical methods to support the NHP industry

ISURA and the National Research Council Canada (NRC) collaborated to develop robust and affordable non-targeted analytical methods to assist the Natural Health Products (NHP) industry in reliably identifying and authenticating high quality functional ingredients (FIs). Several methods were considered and two were confirmed as providing reliable solutions and reproducible approaches to authenticate botanicals and other FIs in NHPs. Read the Summary.