A comprehensive characterization of C-glycosyl flavones in wheat germ has been conducted using multi-stage high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMSn) in combination with a mass defect filtering (MDF) technique. MDF performed the initial search of raw data with defined C-glycosyl flavone mass windows and mass defect windows to generate the noise-reduced data focusing on targeted flavonoids. The high specificity of the exact mass measurement permits the unambiguous discrimination of acyl groups (nominal masses of 146, 162 and 176.) from sugar moieties (rhamnose, glucose or galactose and glucuronic acid). A total of 72 flavone C-glycosyl derivatives, including 2 mono-C-glycosides, 34 di-C-glycosides, 14 acyl di-C-glycosides and 7 acyl tri-C-glycosides, were characterized in wheat germ, some of which were considered to be important marker compounds for differentiation of whole grain and refined wheat products. The 7 acylated mono-O-glycosyl-di-C-glycosyl flavones and some acylated di-C-glycosyl flavones are reported in wheat for the first time. The frequent occurrence of numerous isomers is a remarkable feature of wheat germ flavones. Both UV and mass spectra are needed to maximize the structure information obtained for data interpretation.

A sensitive and reproducible high-performance liquid chromatography method with ultraviolet detection (UV) was developed for the determination of carnosic acid (CA) in rat plasma. After simple acidification and liquid-liquid extraction of plasma samples using gemfibrozil as an internal standard, the supernatant was evaporated to dryness under a gentle stream of nitrogen. The residue was reconstituted in 200 microL before being injected into the chromatographic system. The analysis was performed on a C(18) column protected by an ODS guard column using acetonitrile-0.1% phosphoric acid (55:45, v/v) as mobile phase, and the wavelength of the UV detector was set at 210 nm. The calibration curve was linear over the range of 0.265-265.0 microg/mL with a correlation coefficient of 0.9997. The recovery for plasma samples of 0.530, 13.25, 132.5 and 265.0 microg/mL was 72.2, 87.9, 90.4 and 94.7%, respectively. The intra-day and inter-day relative standard deviations for the measurements of quality control samples were less than 3.1%. The stability of the plasma samples was also validated. This method was successfully used to study the pharmacokinetics and bioavailability of CA in rats.

Four new jatrophane-type diterpenoids (1-4), together with 16 known related compounds, were isolated from the Chinese medicinal plant Euphorbia helioscopia. The structures of 1-4 were determined on the basis of spectroscopic and chemical methods. Cytotoxicity of the isolated compounds against HeLa and MDA-MB-231 cells was evaluated, with only helioscopinolide A (5) and euphornin (3a) being active.