A metabolite fingerprinting for the characterization of commercial botanical dietary supplements

Abstract

Phytopharmaceuticals, phytomedicines and botanical dietary supplements are products of wide interest considering the increase of their use. The development of fast and effective analytical methods able to give a fingerprinting of the product, on the basis of the plant extracts declared to be contained in it, is surely of high interest. In a previous investigation electrospray mass spectrometry was proved to be effective for the characterization of plant extracts. The direct infusion of the samples and the analyses in both positive and negative ion mode lead to a clear differentiation of the different samples. To verify if the same approach can be effective also for mixtures of plant extracts, five different commercial dietary supplements [Sedivitax gocce (1), Finocarbo Plus opercoli (2), Sollievo Bio tavolette (3), MiniMas opercoli (4) and Ruscoven gocce (5), all products from Aboca S.p.A., Sansepolcro, Italy] were analyzed by ESI. In order to evaluate possible changes in the metabolic profile with respect to different years of production, ten different batches of the commercial dietary supplements were considered. The mass spectral data were evaluated by multivariate analysis and the obtained results suggest that the method allows a satisfactory and rapid characterization of complex mixtures of commercial dietary supplements

Comparative HPLC-DAD-ESI(+)MS Fingerprint and Quantification of Phenolic and Flavonoid Composition of Aqueous Leaf Extracts of <i>Cornus mas<i> and <i>Crataegus monogyna</i>, in Relation to Their Cardiotonic Potential

“…The most advanced technique used today is high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS), a powerful identification technique, based on specific fragmentation of each separated molecule (Socaciu et al, 2009;Mattoli et al, 2011;Khoddami et al, 2013). Although organic solvent (methanol) extraction is the main method used to extract phenolics, for medical studies aqueous extraction using microwaves or ultrasounds is an ecologic alternative.…”

Multiclass methods in the analysis of metabolomic datasets: The example of raspberry cultivar volatile compounds detected by GC–MS and PTR-MS

“…After improving the data analysis methodology (Cappellin, Biasioli, et al, 2010;Cappellin et al, 2011), recently, the first application followed (Cappellin, Soukoulis, et al, 2012), showing that PTR-MS coupled to a time-of-flight spectrometer and to suitable data mining methods is a powerful tool for separating apple cultivars and clones on the basis of their VOC emission profiles. Another high-throughput approach has been attempted by several other research groups through direct infusion of non-volatile compounds (mainly from liquid samples) into mass spectrometers (Favé et al, 2011;Højer-Pedersen, Smedsgaard, & Nielsen, 2008;Mattoli et al, 2010;McDougall, Martinussen, & Stewart, 2008) but with scarce results mainly due to ion suppression (Annesley, 2003;Sterner, Johnston, Nicol, & Ridge, 2000) and very complex spectra.…”

The role of mass spectrometry in studies of glycation processes and diabetes management

“…This approach permits to monitor the extract quality of single/multi herbal extracts, as in the case of the DB14201 extract (Gopalakrishna Pillai et al ., ), whose marker compounds were mangiferin, berberine, kaempferol, and curcumin. Alternatively, untargeted approaches based on chemical fingerprint and multivariate statistical analyses can be employed (Mattoli et al ., , ). This approach could represent a fast and holistic way to valuate changes in the metabolic plant/extract profile with respect to different years of production, cultivar origin, and industrial batches.…”