Abstract
Tannins are large-molecular-weight plant polyphenols that are produced in fruits, berries, leaves, flowers, seeds, stems, and roots of woody and non-woody plants. Hundreds and thousands of individual tannin structures are consequently found in many kinds of natural food and feed products. The huge structural variability in tannins is reflected as vast bioactivity differences between them but not in the accuracy of their typical analysis methods. Here, I show how the modern liquid chromatography mass spectrometry methods can be used to obtain new types of two-dimensional tannin fingerprints to better visualize both the tannin content and diversity in plants with just one 10 min analysis per sample.
Highlights
Plants synthesize a vast variety of secondary metabolites that may have multiple functions for the plant
One of the most common specialized metabolite groups in plants are the polyphenols, and the largest subgroup of these are the tannins. They are traditionally viewed as plant defense compounds, but many of them possess beneficial properties for both human and animal nutrition and health, such as antioxidant, antimicrobial, antiviral, anthelmintic, and more generally protein-binding activities.[2−4] Their relatively complex and large structures and the presence of thousands of tannins in plants offer an analytical challenge that cannot be overcome by analyzing tannins compound by compound in plant samples
PAs can be analyzed at the compound level by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC−MS) only for small oligomers, such as dimers to pentamers.[5,6]
Summary
Plants synthesize a vast variety of secondary metabolites that may have multiple functions for the plant. As both triple-quadrupole mass spectrometers and inbuilt ion mobility units are becoming more popular, it could be possible to enhance the Engström method, so that the cis and trans forms of the PC and PD terminal and extension units could be detected separately on the basis of their ion mobility differences Such an improvement would enable more in-depth 2D or actual three-dimensional (3D) fingerprinting of the PA composition of plant samples, just like the inclusion of the more rare PAs with propelargonidin and 5-deoxy units, such as profisetinidins, into the repertoire of group-specific MRM methods. It is exciting to see how the use of Perspective ever more efficient high-resolution mass spectrometers can be developed to better serve tannin analyses, because, currently, they certainly are more widely used in small-molecule metabolomics-style analyses than in, e.g., PA polymer fingerprinting
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