Alan Millar

Most plants used in traditional Chinese medicine must be processed before their medicinal usage; hence the effective ingredients may differ from those in the freshly harvested plant extracts. In this work, we present a fast and generic approach using sub-2-?m liquid chromatography–time-of-flight–mass spectrometry (sub-2-?m-LC–TOF-MS) coupled with multivariate statistical data analysis to systematically profile ingredient changes between fresh and processed samples of huang jing.

An effective metabolite identification study should ideally include both qualitative and quantitative information that for both identifying metabolites, and determining the rate of clearance and the metabolic routes of the parent drug. Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) is considered the standard analytical technique for metabolite identification studies. To date, however, qualitative and quantitative information has always been obtained from two separation platforms: quadrupole time-of-flight (QTof) MS for the exact mass full-scan qualitative study, and tandem quadrupole MS for the multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) quantitative study. With advancements to QTof instrumentation, specifically, recent improvements in sensitivity and dynamic range, it is now possible to perform both qualitative and quantitative experiments on a single QTof mass spectrometer. This article describes a workflow that allows simultaneous qualitative and quantitative metabolite identification studies to be..