Unlock nature's secrets with precision. Elevate your supplements and natural health products analysis with mass spectrometry.
Supplements and natural health products analysis
Health supplements drive demand for enhanced testing against fraud and to ensure integrity
Global demand for supplements testing is rising sharply as an increasing number of supplements are being sold online. Increased health consciousness in developed countries is a main driver for this demand. In regions of the world where health care is expensive or unreliable, people also turn towards natural remedies and nutritional supplements.
However, not all supplements are safe.
Processed herbal products like tea mixtures or capsules with herbal powders pose a risk for adulteration, containing undeclared ingredients which have been added either intentionally or unintentionally.
Intentionally Added Substances:
Compounds such as pharmaceuticals and other chemicals have been identified in natural health products.
- Weight loss products have been found contain undeclared active pharmaceuticals.
- Antioxidant products like turmeric have been found to contain carcinogenic dyes.
Unintentionally Added Compounds:
Environmental conditions can influence metabolites in plants and therefore affect the final formulation.
The replacement of one plant commodity with another one or unintentional co-harvest of toxic-containing weeds are issues that require attention in supply chains.
- By-harvested plants that contain liver-toxic alkaloids have been found in children's tea.
- Trending mushroom formulations like gummies or drink powders pose a risk of containing mushroom species with illegal active substances such as psilocybin.
To maintain effectiveness and quality, it is important for manufacturers to characterize raw materials.
Food supplements and additives were the second most seized food type, by quantity, after alcoholic beverages in Interpol’s annual food fraud operation, Operation Opson X in 2021.
SCIEX provides solutions to addressing both intentional and unintentional adulteration.
- Targeted ingredient analysis
- Adulteration testing which can be targeted compound analysis or non-targeted screening
SCIEX OS software is intuitive to allow first-users to navigate information-rich data sets such as non-targeted screening data. Statistical analysis becomes smarter and faster with data visualization tools. Compound libraries enable customers to identify unknown natural product compounds. Along with the HR-MS information, which is available in the Natural Products Library - Traditional Chinese Medicine, this library product contains additional compound entries with structural information and MS/MS spectra.
Monitoring the effects of agricultural practices on highly traded commodities
Setting a new standard for compound discovery in citrus fruits with metabolomics
Commercial citrus fruits undergo continuous agricultural practices to improve their flavor, appearance and nutritional value, for example. As these attributes are closely associated with the citrus metabolite composition, metabolomics can be used to monitor changes in metabolite profiles from preharvest practices that are targeted toward optimizing fruit quality.
- Confidence in identifying low-level or even previously undetected compounds
- Signal-to-noise enhancements increase the quality of chromatographic peaks extracted from fragment masses in Zeno MRMHR
- A single LC-MS/MS method for structurally diverse components —such as sugars, organic acids, amino acids, flavonoids, limonoids and lipids
Supplements and natural products workflow
Solution
SCIEX high resolution mass spectrometry solution for product characterization.
- Characterization of raw materials
- Unknown screening of raw and finished products
X500R QTOF system
A uniquely engineered and versatile QTOF build to handle the demands of any high throughput laboratory.
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SCIEX OS software
Unleash the analytical power of the next-generation software platform for data acquisition and processing.
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MarkerView software
Designed with non-statisticians in mind and intuitively developed, MarkerView software does the heavy lifting so you can focus on high-value decisions like reviewing trends and differences in targeted or untargeted mass spec workflows. Distill complex datasets quickly, find statistically significant differences and reveal key insights faster. MarkerView software is now integrated into the SCIEX OS ecosystem.
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Natural Products High Resolution MS/MS Spectral Library
The Natural Products HR-MS/MS Library contains the high resolution MS/MS spectra in positive and negative ion mode (where appropriate) comprising more than 2,500 compounds assoicated with natural products and traditional medicines.
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Technical note
Profiling and identification of hop-derived bitter compounds in beer using LC-MS/MS
Samples were processed using a targeted approach to profile known hop-derived bitter compounds and were also processed using PCA in MarkerView Software.
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Technical note
Screening and identification of natural products in citrus oil
A unique feature of this workflow is that both chemical classes –pesticides and natural products – were analyzed in the same injection, thus greatly simplifying the analysis.
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Technical note
Chemical Components Identification of Cistanche Deserticola - Traditional Chinese Medicine
High-resolution MS/MS Chinese medicine databases including component references in the pharmacopeia and active ingredients in the herbs, with nearly 900 compounds.
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Technical note
Identification of Ginsenosides Using the SCIEX X500R QTOF System
Comprehensive scoring allows intuitive, rapid, and accurate ginsenoside component identification. The SCIEX high resolution database includes almost a thousand compounds such as saponins, flavonoids, flavonoid glycosides, triterpenes, phenylethyl glycosides, and organic acids.
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Technical note
SWATH® Acquisition LC-QTOF-MS/MS analysis of food colors and illegal dyes in spices
Detect and identify 98 dyes, both lipophilic Sudan-type illegal dyes and the hydrophilic artificial ones in spices with a custom library.
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Compendium
X500 QTOF System Applied to Natural Products Testing
A compendium of QTOF applications for natural product analysis.
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Technical note
Rapid determination of Aconitum alkaloids in adulterated spice powders
The CFIA developed a rapid procedure for quantifying Aconitum alkaloids in the suspect samples by LC-MS/MS. The method was extended to include additional alkaloids, other spice powders and spectral MS/MS acquisition for compound confirmation.
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Technical note
Highly selective analysis of pyrrolizidine alkaloids in herbal extracts
The method with 27 compounds covers all 17 PAs that EFSA recommends for monitoring in food, other PAs that are suggested for routine analysis by the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Germany (BfR), and some additional isomeric species of PAs.
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Technical note
Quantification of psilocybin and psilocin in mushroom by LC-MS/MS
Using a simple sample preparation procedure, detection limits of 1 ppb for psilocybin and 0.1 ppb for psilocin were achieved. Based on the known concentration of these compounds in mushrooms, the SCIEX Triple Quad 3500 System has the right sensitivity range for this method.
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Technical note
LC-MS/MS rapid quantification and screening method for 222 pesticide residues in tea
A QuEChERS method for sample pre-treatment and a single injection provide high efficiency, high throughput and broad screening for the quantification of 222 pesticides in tea matrix.
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Technical note
Analyzing Different Compositions of Polygala from Different Regions Using the X500R QTOF System
Data entry and PCA analysis in MarkerView software is rapid. T-experimental statistical analysis enables users to quickly identify differentiated ions among groups and alleviates the difficulty of analyzing massive data sets.