Metabolomics study of cured tobacco using liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry: Method development and its application in investigating the chemical differences of tobacco from three growing regions

Abstract

Cured tobacco is an important plant material. Component studies are a big challenge for its significantly diverse chemical properties and vastly different concentrations. In this work, liquid chromatography with quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry was used to perform a metabolomics study of cured tobacco owing to its efficient separation and detection of semipolar metabolites. A solvent of methanol/water (8:2, v/v) and 30 min of ultrasound time were found to be optimal to perform extraction. 95, 92, and 93% of metabolite features had within 20% of coefficient of variation for repeatability, intraday and interday precision analysis, respectively, indicating a good stability of the method developed. 113 metabolites were identified in cured tobacco based on accurate mass, retention time, and MS/MS fragments. The developed method was applied to a metabolomics study of cured tobacco from three growing regions. Forty three metabolites were found to be contributed to the classification. It is shown that the developed method can be applied to metabolomics analysis of plant materials.

Untargeted Metabolomics of Nicotiana tabacum Grown in United States and India Characterizes the Association of Plant Metabolomes With Natural Climate and Geography

“…Extreme temperature (together with water deficit) and high solar radiation were reported to strongly affect grapevine growth, which further led to negative effects on fruit and wine quality (Teixeira et al, 2014). A field study in China revealed that different field conditions also affected the profiles of polar metabolites in tobacco leaves such as flavonoids (Li et al, 2014). In 2 years of our field experiments, it rained only once during each year in India.…”

Discrimination of crude and processed rhubarb products using a chemometric approach based on ultra fast liquid chromatography with ion trap/time-of-flight mass spectrometry

“…Plant metabolomics has been widely applied in comparing mutants and transgenic plants with their wild types, exploring the influence of external stimuli (such as processing) on chemical composition, controlling the quality of herbs and so on [6][7][8]. Up to now, discrimination of three different rhubarb products has been achieved based on HPLC-UV fingerprints [9].…”

“…To data LC-MS with reasonable qualitative and quantitative capability has been increasingly used for chemical profiling and QC of TCMs [6,10]. Among various LC platforms, ultra fast liquid chromatography (UFLC)…”

Potential of monitoring isotopologues by quantitative gas chromatography with time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry for metabolomic assay

“…Metabolomics has been used to determine quantitative differences of the endogenous metabolites to find the relationship between metabolites and its physiological or/and pathological changes . MS‐based analytical tools such as LC–MS , GC–MS , and CE–MS have been employed in metabolomic analysis, which produce a large amount of complex MS data. The effective biological conclusions will be obtained through the reliable processed MS data.…”