Abstract
Mass spectrometry is currently one of the most versatile and sensitive instrumental methods applied to structural characterization of plant secondary metabolite mixtures isolated from biological material. Plant tissues contain thousands of natural products fulfilling different roles in plant physiology and biochemistry. These natural products have various biological activities in respect to plants synthesizing them, in their responses to different environmental stresses and are also active principles of food supplements and pharmaceuticals of plant origin. Flavonoids constitute a large group of phenolic secondary metabolites and are probably produced by all terrestrial plant species. More than 9000 glycoconjugates of flavonoids are presently known in the plant kingdom and more than 50 of them may be present in a single plant. For this reason methods of identification and analysis of this group of compounds are particularly demanded. Due to a high number of metabolites present in plant extracts, the isolation and purification of most compounds in amounts suitable for unambiguous characterization with NMR methods is often impossible. For these reasons elaboration of strategies for sufficiently precise structural characterization of compounds present in mixture samples is currently a primary task. Mass spectrometry, thanks to application of different physical phenomena for ionization, separation and detection of analyzed molecules, became the method of choice among analytical methods applied for identification, structural characterization and quantitative analysis of the natural products. Methods of analysis of differently substituted flavonoids (O- and C-glycosides, differentiation of various oligosaccharidic substituents, detection of acylated compounds) are presented in the paper. A proper application of mass spectrometric methods in well-defined and strictly controlled technical parameters of analysis permits obtaining important structural information. Among others, recording collision induced dissociation mass spectra allows identification of compounds after comparison of the registered MS spectra with these present in the existing databases.
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