Detecting Adulteration: Huperzine A Case Study

The dietary supplement industry is prone to economically motivated adulteration due to increasing popularity of natural-sourced ingredients. Huperzine A, a supplement ingredient extracted from the Chinese club moss Huperzia serrata, is an example of a plant-based nutraceutical that is vulnerable to adulteration through the fraudulent use of petrochemical-derived synthetics. Within the market, in some cases, Huperzine A supplements that have been exposed to ingredient adulteration are still claimed as natural-sourced on product labels.1-2 As a result, the supplement industry depends on analytical techniques to detect ingredient adulteration. Choosing a robust quality control method, however, is a common challenge for manufacturers. This article focuses on verification of the source of three different brands of Huperzine A plant extract samples through the comparison of two different methods: high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) fingerprinting, and carbon-14 (radiocarbon) analy