Abstract
Plant hormones are small molecular natural products that regulate all plant developmental processes at low concentrations. Quantitative analysis of plant hormones is increasingly important for in-depth study of their biosynthesis, transport, metabolism and molecular regulatory mechanisms. Although plant hormone analysis remains a bottleneck in plant scientific research owing to the trace concentrations and complex components in plant crude extracts, much progress has been achieved in the development of extraction, purification and detection techniques in recent years. Solid phase extraction and chromatography/mass spectrometry have been applied widely for purification and quantitative analysis of plant hormones owing to their high selectivity and sensitivity. Purification methods such as liquid partition and immunoaffinity chromatography, and detection methods including immunoassay and electrochemical analysis, are employed. The advantages and disadvantages of these methods are discussed. In situ, real-time and multi-plant hormone profiling will comprise mainstream techniques for quantitative analyses in future studies on the regulatory mechanisms and crosstalk of plant hormones.
Highlights
Because hormones are present in plant tissues at very low concentrations, and their determination can be hindered by hundreds of other abundant primary and secondary metabolites, the purification and enrichment of hormones is very crucial for the final assay
Chromatography combined with mass spectrometry, especially triple quadrupole mass spectrometry, has rapidly become a highly sensitive, selective tool for plant hormone analyses in practice
gas chromatography (GC) or LC coupled with tandem mass spectrometry significantly improves the sensitivity and provides structural information based on fragmentation patterns
Summary
As a special subset of plant secondary metabolites, plant hormones occur at very low concentrations of 0.1–50 ng g–1. Fresh weight inside the plant, which are about one tenthousandth or even lower than the concentration of other types of plant secondary metabolites such as flavonoids [5]. Many plant hormones coexist with other endogenous organic compounds in plant extracts, which may interfere with the final assay of the plant hormones. It is important to design an extraction and purification strategy that can remove the interfering substances and enrich the target compounds from the complex plant extracts
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