Abstract
The beneficial effects of plant-rich diets and traditional medicines are increasingly recognized in the treatment of civilization diseases due to the abundance and diversity of bioactive substances therein. However, the important active portion of natural food or plant-based medicine is presently not under control. Hence, a paradigm shift from quality control based on marker compounds to effect-directed profiling is postulated. We investigated 68 powdered plant extracts (botanicals) which are added to food products in food industry. Among them are many plants that are used as traditional medicines, herbs and spices. A generic strategy was developed to evaluate the bioactivity profile of each botanical as completely as possible and to straightforwardly assign the most potent bioactive compounds. It is an 8-dimensional hyphenation of normal-phase high-performance thin-layer chromatography with multi-imaging by ultraviolet, visible and fluorescence light detection as well as effect-directed assay and heart-cut of the bioactive zone to orthogonal reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromato-graphy−photodiode array detection−heated electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. In the non-target, effect-directed screening via 16 different on-surface assays, we tentatively assigned more than 60 important bioactive compounds in the studied botanicals. These were antibacterials, estrogens, antiestrogens, androgens, and antiandrogens, as well as acetylcholinesterase, butyrylcholinesterase, α-amylase, α-glucosidase, β-glucosidase, β-glucuronidase, and tyrosinase inhibitors, which were on-surface heart-cut eluted from the bioautogram or enzyme inhibition autogram to the next dimension for further targeted characterization. This biological-physicochemical hyphenation is able to detect and control active mechanisms of traditional medicines or botanicals as well as the essentials of plant-based food. The array of 1,292 profiles (68 samples × 19 detections) showed the versatile bioactivity potential of natural food. It reveals how efficiently and powerful our natural food contributes to our homeostasis.
Highlights
Herbs and spices are widely used for nutrition, flavoring, cosmetics, dyeing, or fragrances (Guldiken et al, 2018)
A total of 68 very different powdered plant extracts and 16 different effectdirected assays were selected to investigate and prove the suitability of the biological–physicochemical 8D hyphenation for generic screening (Figure 1)
Since there was no access to a high-resolution mass spectrometry system, the assignments were verified by comparing with reference standards
Summary
Herbs and spices are widely used for nutrition, flavoring, cosmetics, dyeing, or fragrances (Guldiken et al, 2018) They are applied in medicine due to their known beneficial effects on human health (Yuan et al, 2016; Caesar et al, 2019), inspired by traditional healers who have used botanical extracts since ancient times (Belwal et al, 2018b). Some studies have quantified the total amount of healthful constituents in herbal extracts and calculated the recommended intake of antioxidants from culinary herbs (Halvorsen et al, 2002; Wojdylo et al, 2007) Their multifactorial relevance in homeostasis is underexplored. It is evident that the use of the whole natural plant extract is more powerful for homeostasis due to the versatility of the gentle mechanisms of active compounds than the use of isolated compounds (Morlock and Heil, 2020)
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