USBSL Tests Botanical ID, Purity

ASHEVILLE, N.C.The nonprofit US Botanical Safety Laboratory (USBSL) will begin offering botanical identity, purity and phytochemical composition testing of botanical ingredients starting April 23, 2012. The organization, formed by the Bent Creek Institute and The North Carolina Arboretum, will offer the "Purity" tests including assays for microbials, heavy metals and pesticides.

USBSL will serve a variety clients in academia, public nongovernmental organizations, and private industry supply chains who are seeking to verify the integrity, authenticity and purity of their botanical ingredients. USBSLs botanical identity testing will be backed by botanical vouchers maintained by Joe-Ann McCoy, Ph.D., laboratory director of the Bent Creek Germplasm Repository. McCoy is a medicinal plant physiologist and microscopy researcher who is an advisory board member to the American Botanical Council (ABC).

USBSL is managed executively and administratively by Bent Creek Institute Inc., an independent nonprofit botanical research and economic development organization. Bent Creek Institute will receive, qualify, and blind all botanical samples using a secure and private Internet-based sample submission and tracking system, and issue all final certificates of analysis to clients. Under this sample management protocol, USBSL partner labs will never know the identity of the client who submitted the original samples, thus assuring the non-biased nature of the analytical results.

USBSL consists of a network of nonprofit testing laboratories in North Carolina with a depth of botanical domain expertise. The founding USBSL partner labs are the Bent Creek Germplasm Repository at The North Carolina Arboretum, the NC BioNetwork BioBusiness Center Laboratory at the Asheville-Buncombe Community Technical Community College, and the David H. Murdock Research Institute at the NC Research Campus in Kannapolis, NC.  The Bent Creek Germplasm Repository houses a national collection of Black Cohosh (Actaea racemosa), as well as more than 1,500 vouchered medicinal plant accessions and a related screening reference extract library.

Learn more about the integrity of botanicals and reference materials in this SupplySide Store on-demand video, "How To Ensure Botanical Integrity."