The ability to rapidly identify and quantitate, over a wide range of concentrations, anthocyanins in food and therapeutic products is important to ensuring their presence at medicinally significant levels. Sensitive, yet mild, analysis conditions are required given their susceptibility to degradation and transformation. Paper spray ionization has been used to detect and quantify the levels of anthocyanin levels in extracts of fresh and dried elderberries, and elderberry stems, as well as 3 commercially available nutraceutical formulations. The component cyanidin glucosides, including cyanidin-3-sambubioside, cyanidin-3-glucoside, cyanidin-3,5-diglucoside, cyanidin-3-sambubioside-5-glucoside, and the aglycone cyanidin, were readily detected in a range of sources. Quantitation was achieved by establishing a calibration plot from dilutions of a stock solution of cyanidin-3,5-diglucoside containing malvidin-3,5-diglucoside as an internal standard at a fixed concentration. The same standard was used to quantify the anthocyanin content in the fruit and nutraceutical formulations. Wide 5-fold variations in anthocyanin concentration were detected in the nutraceutical formulations from different suppliers ranging from 1050 to 5430 mg/100 g. These concentrations compared with 500 to 2370 mg/100 g measured in the dried stems and fruit, respectively.
KEYWORDSanthocyanins, elderberry, paper spray mass spectrometry, quantitation Paper spray has been used to detect and quantitate pharmaceuticals in blood 26 and even for the direct analysis of biological tissues. 27 However, the range of compounds that can be successfully analysed by this relatively new ionization technique has yet to be fully explored. [28][29][30] This article reports on the first detection and quantitation of anthocyanins in elderberry fruit extracts and in elderberry-based nutraceutical formulations using PSI mass spectrometry (PSI-MS).
| MATERIALS AND METHODS
| Stock materials and solution preparationsStock solutions of cyanidin 3-sambubioside (CS) (Polyphenols, Sandnes, Norway) at 1 μg/μL and both cyanidin-3,5-diglucoside (CDG) and malvidin-3,5-diglucoside (Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, Missouri) at 100 ng/μL were prepared in methanol. To prepare calibration solutions, the cyanidin-3,5-diglucoside (CDG) stock solution (100 ng/μL) was diluted in methanol to final concentrations of 0.5, 1, 5, and 10 ng/μL. A volume (100 μL) of the stock malvidin diglucoside solution was added, as an internal standard, to an aliquot (900 μL) of each calibration solution.Three nutraceutical formulations (designated samples A, B, and C) reported to contain anthocyanins were purchased in capsule form from pharmacies. A portion (35 mg) of the capsule contents were dissolved in 70% ethanol (10 mL) containing 0.5% hydrochloric acid to maintain a low pH. To each solution, malvidin diglucoside stock solution was added to achieve a final concentration of 10 ng/μL as an internal standard.Black elderberry (Sambucus nigra) was obtained from an Australian grower (Ashbolt Farms, Plen...