Metabolites Software-Assisted Flavonoid Hunting in Plants Using Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Quadrupole-Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry

Molecules

Wan-Yi Gu¹  Na Li¹  Elaine Lai-Han Leung¹  Hua Zhou¹  Guo-An Luo¹  Liang Liu¹  Jian-Lin Wu¹ 

[1] State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Macau Institute for Applied Research in Medicine and Health, Macau University of Science and Technology, Avenida Wai Long, Taipa, Macao, China; E-Mails:

关键词: in-house metabolites software-assisted flavonoid database;    biosynthetic pathways;    UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS;    Smilax glabra;    flavonoid hunting;   

DOI  :  10.3390/molecules20033955

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Plant secondary metabolism drives the generation of metabolites used for host plant resistance, as biopesticides and botanicals, even for the discovery of new therapeutics for human diseases. Flavonoids are one of the largest and most studied classes of specialized plant metabolites. To quickly identify the potential bioactive flavonoids in herbs, a metabolites software-assisted flavonoid hunting approach was developed, which mainly included three steps: firstly, utilizing commercial metabolite software, a flavonoids database was established based on the biosynthetic pathways; secondly, mass spectral data of components in herbs were acquired by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole-time of flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS); and finally, the acquired LC-MS data were imported into the database and the compounds in the herbs were automatically identified by comparison of their mass spectra with the theoretical values. As a case study, the flavonoids in Smilax glabra were profiled using this approach. As a result, 104 flavonoids including 27 potential new compounds were identified. To our knowledge, this is the first report on profiling the components in the plants utilizing the plant metabolic principles with the assistance of metabolites software. This approach can be extended to the analysis of flavonoids in other plants.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.