Screening and identification of undeclared synthetic compounds as adulterants using UPLC-QTOF-MS coupled to a novel informatics platform
Dhavalkumar Narendrabhai Patel, L Qiao, Jisung Yuk, Giorgis Isaac, K Yu · Planta Medica · 2015
The wide spread use and increasing demand for herbal products as economical and perceived safe alternatives to prescription drugs has led to the increase of such products being adulterated with undeclared synthetic compounds by unscrupulous manufacturers. LC-MS based methods are widely-used for the characterization of adulterants because of their high sensitivity and selectively for samples from complex matrices. However, from LC-MS sample acquisition to data processing/analysis, critical steps are required in order to effectively determine the answer. In this study, two commercial herbal product samples to relieve pain and inflammation were obtained from India and Taiwan and were analyzed using UPLC and QTof MS coupled to a novel informatics platform. A natural product analytical workflow was used to analyze the mass spectra of the herbal products which utilize tools such as an adulterant database library containing accurate mass fragment ions for confirmation of analytes of interest, structure elucidation module and automatic reports to effectively provide the visualization of the results. For the commercial sample obtained from India, phenylbutazone and oxyphenbutazone were identified as adulterants while, no adulterants were found from the sample purchased from Taiwan. Here, we present a comprehensive streamlined workflow to quickly screen and identify adulterants from a single LC/MS injection using a novel informatics platform.