Scientific Evidence

Phytopharmaceuticals, phytomedicines and botanical dietary supplements are products of wide interest considering the increase of their use. The development of fast and effective analytical methods able to give a fingerprinting of the product, on the basis of the plant extracts declared to be contained in it, is surely of high interest. In a previous investigation electrospray mass spectrometry was proved to be effective for the characterization of plant extracts. The direct infusion of the samples and the analyses in both positive and negative ion mode lead to a clear differentiation of the different samples. To verify if the same approach can be effective also for mixtures of plant extracts, five different commercial dietary supplements [Sedivitax gocce (1), Finocarbo Plus opercoli (2), Sollievo Bio tavolette (3), MiniMas opercoli (4) and Ruscoven gocce (5), all products from Aboca S.p.A., Sansepolcro, Italy] were analyzed by ESI. In order to evaluate possible changes in the metabolic profile with respect to different years of production, ten different batches of the commercial dietary supplements were considered. The mass spectral data were evaluated by multivariate analysis and the obtained results suggest that the method allows a satisfactory and rapid characterization of complex mixtures of commercial dietary supplements.

The standardization and quality control of plant extracts is an important topic, in particular, when such extracts are used for medicinal purposes. Consequently, the development of fast and effective analytical methods for metabolomic ¿ngerprinting of plant extracts is of high interest. In this investigation, electrospray mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) and 1H NMR techniques were employed with further statistical analyses of the acquired data. The results showed that negative ion mode ESI-MS is particularly effective for characterization of plant extracts. Different samples of the same species appear well-clustered and separated from the other species. To verify the effectiveness of the method, two other batches of extracts from a species, in which the principal components were already identi¿ed (Cynara scolymus), were analyzed, and the components that were veri¿ed by the principal component analysis (PCA) were found to be within the region identi¿ed as characteristic of Cynara Scolymus extracts. The data from extracts of the other species were well separated from those pertaining to the species previously characterized. Only the case of a species that was strictly correlated from a botanical point of view, with extracts that were previously analyzed, showed overlapping. Copyright 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.