The increasing worldwide demand for herbal remedies has raised serious issues about authenticity, safety, and quality of commercial products, especially those made from multiple plant species. Conventional identification techniques—morphological, microscopic, and chemical profiling—are commonly found to be ineffective in identifying adulteration in the processed products.DNA metabarcoding, which is the integration of DNA barcoding with high-throughput sequencing (HTS), offers a quick, accurate, and non-destructive method for identifying the presence of plant ingredients in multicomponent mixtures of herbs. Recent advances in DNA metabarcoding, their applications to detect mislabeling, substitution, and contamination, and their restrictions like primer bias, degraded DNA, and reference database incompleteness are reviewed here. We discuss regulatory implications and how the molecular tool can enhance herbal product quality control. With expanding global herbal markets, inclusion of DNA metabarcoding within regulatory schemes presents a revolutionizing means for enhancing safety, efficacy, and confidence in herbal medicine.

Lamiaceae contains many medicinal and aromatic plants for which accurate identification can be problematic due to morphological resemblance of related species, environmental plasticity, renaming (e.g., Rosmarinus officinalis, currently considered Salvia rosmarinus), and substitution/adulteration of herbal material dried and processed. This narrative review, based on laboratory and in Silico data as examples, provides a workflow for the identification and molecular authentication of some species of Lamiaceae, starting from their field collection. Literature regarding plant barcoding (e.g., rbcL, matK, ITS2, trnH-psbA) and additional methods such as species-specific PCR, high-resolution melting, digital PCR and metabarcoding was synthesised. The workflow includes field collection and botanical identification of voucher specimens; CTAB DNA extraction procedure, optionally supplemented with spin-column DNA purification; assessment of DNA quality and amplicon size using agarose gel electrophoresis; SYBR Green real-time qPCR (targeting GAPDH and ITS2); GenBank and BOLD search followed by MUSCLE multiple alignment and phylogenetic analysis in MEGA 12.1.3 (1,000 bootstrap replicates). However, no one marker is considered to be able to discriminate all taxa, rbcL and matK markers form the basis, while ITS2 and trnH-psbA can be used as complementary markers. For example, in the case of the rbcL tree based on the alignment of ten reference sequences, the maximum level of support (100%) could be seen for the Origanum majorana- Ocimum tenuiflorum clade only, while the other nodes have low levels of support (less than 50%). Taxonomic identification thus needs to involve voucher information, sequence comparison, phylogenetic placement and, when necessary, chemical composition.