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An UPLC-Orbitrap MS system was exploited to develop and validate a method for the simultaneous determination of 11 water-soluble azo dyes (Acid Yellow 17, Acid Red 14, Acid Red 26, Acid Red 73, Acid Orange 52, Acid Orange 7, Acid Orange 12, Acid Yellow 36, Acid Orange 5, Acid Red 88 and Acid Red 9) in soft drinks. Three pairs of isomers and four disulphonated azo dyes were among a total of 11 water-soluble azo dyes obtained and purified using an SPE cartridge. They were well separated using optimized UPLC conditions with a RP18 column and a MS detector with a compatible mobile phase system. All these dyes were detected by the Orbitrap XL mass spectrometer in negative ion mode. HCD tandem MS fragment ions are first reported in this paper, and these fragment ions can be used for identification of isomers of azo dyes. According to SANCO/10684/2009, one quasi-molecular ion in full scan mode as quantification ion and one or two HCD tandem MS fragment ions as identification ions are required for compound confirmation. Matrix-matched calibration was employed for quantification. The linear matrix-matched calibration for the 11 dyes was in the range 5-200 ng g(-1) with correlation coefficients (r) of 0.9939-0.9988. Recoveries were 68.9-110.8% with coefficients of variation of 0.9-12.0%. Depending on the dye and matrix involved, the LODs were between 1.0 and 3.2 ng g(-1) and LOQs were between 5.2 and 9.8 ng g(-1).

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Developing methods for the systematic and rapid identification of the chemical compositions of fresh plant tissues has long attracted the attention of phytochemists and pharmacologists. In the present study, based on highly efficient sample pretreatment and high‐throughput analysis of high‐performance liquid chromatography coupled with quadrupole time of flight tandem mass spectrometry data using molecular networks, a method was developed for systematically analyzing the chemical constituents of the fresh flowers of Robinia hispida L. and Robina pseudoacacia L., two congeneric ornamental species that lack prior consideration. A total of 44 glycosylated structures were characterized. And on the basis of establishing of the fragmentation pathways of 11 known flavonoid glycosides, together with the molecular networking analysis, 18 other ions of flavonoid glycosides in five classes were clustered. Moreover, 15 soyasaponins/triterpenoid glycosides were tentatively identified by comparison of their tandem mass spectrometry characteristic ions with those reported in the literature or the online Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking database. The water extracts were separated by flash chromatography, which resulted in the discovery of one new compound, named rohispidascopolin, along with five known entities. The pharmacological targets were predicted by SwissTargetPrediction.

Cortex Lycii, the root barks of Lycium barbarum and L. chinense, known as “di gu pi” in traditional Chinese herbal drugs, is an important ingredient of formulations used for treating a variety of diseases. During the last 3 decades, more than 70 chemical entities have been separated and purified from either the aqueous or aqueous ethyl alcohol extracts of Cortex Lycii. In this study, high-performance liquid chromatography together with quadrupole-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MS) was employed to explore new analog structures from aqueous ethyl alcohol extracts (50%, v/v), which led us to discover 4 new phenolic amides and a new cyclic peptide. The structure-based manual screening method, on the basis of the analysis of the fragmentation pathway of the previously known compounds, was used to make a preliminary analysis of the negative total ion chromatography and negative extract ion spectra. Three ions at m/ z 472.1, 314.1, and 445.2 were assigned to phenolic amides, and by further analysis of their MS/MS data, the structure of 1, corresponding to one of them ( m/ z 314.1), was illustrated as an analog of the known compound KN1. A parent ion at m/ z 856.1 was assigned to a cyclic peptide analog (2) in the manual analysis procedure. Furthermore, the MS/MS data were profiled on the Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking (GNPS, https://gnps.ucsd.edu/ProteoSAFe/static/gnps-splash.jsp ) workflow to weave a visualization molecular network. Three more new analog ions ( m/ z 604.3 [3], 597.3 [4], and 611.3 [5]) were found in the aggregation of KN5 and KN7, and their structures were all determined by comparisons with known compounds. This manual and networking automatic screening method may provide a sensitive and efficient procedure to facilitate the mining of novel trace components.