QUALOME: A workflow integrating genotyped reference materials and advanced metabolomics as a new benchmark for quality assessment of herbal medicinal products

The advancement of metabolomics techniques has enabled detailed characterisation of the metabolome of plant species [ 1 ]. Given their complexity, understanding the full phytochemical composition of plant matrices is crucial, especially in the case of herbal medicinal products and dietary supplements, where rigorous quality control approaches are essential to prevent adulteration and ensure their safety, efficacy, and authenticity [ 2 ] but also required to meet rising demands in safety and toxicological assessment, particularly through in silico approaches carried out by the industry [ 3 ]. The QUALOME initiative introduces an innovative workflow that integrates genotyped reference materials with advanced qualitative and quantitative metabolomic profiling, offering a benchmark dataset for quality assessment. Our approach leverages high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) [ 4 ] to characterise comprehensively major and minor compounds. Semi-quantitative data is obtained through charged aerosol detection (CAD) and efficiently linked to HRMS data [ 5 ]. We showcase our workflow on herbal medicinal plants of pharmaceopeial interest, utilizing exhaustive extraction processes across a wide polarity range. QUALOME has been developed to qualitatively and quantitatively estimate the composition of both primary and secondary metabolites, and to provide a reference dataset that serves as a benchmark for the quality assessment of herbal medicinal products. In this study, we applied the QUALOME workflow to a selected set of medicinal plants, namely Arnica montana, Echinacea angustifolia, Acteae racemosa and Eschscholzia californica . We demonstrated its effectiveness in in-depth qualitative and semi-quantitative metabolomic characterisation. Publication History Article published online: 05 March 2026 © 2026. Thieme. All rights reserved. Georg Thieme Verlag KG Oswald-Hesse-Straße 50, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany