Metabolomic Profiling of Medicinal Plants

Metabolomic profiling was performed on methanolic extracts of L. coccineus and M. lutea according to Abdelmohsen et al. [35 (link),36 ,37 (link)] on an Acquity Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography system coupled to a Synapt G2 HDMS quadrupole time-of-flight hybrid mass spectrometer (Waters, Milford, USA). Chromatographic separation was carried out on a BEH C18 column (2.1 × 100 mm, 1.7 μm particle size; Waters, Milford, USA) with a guard column (2.1 x5 mm, 1.7 μm particle size) and a linear binary solvent gradient of 0%–100% eluent B over 6 min at a flow rate of 0.3 mL min−1, using 0.1% formic acid in water (v/v) as solvent A and acetonitrile as solvent B. The injection volume was 2 μL and the column temperature was 40°C. To convert the raw data into separate positive and negative ionization files, MSConvert software was used. The files were then imported to the data mining software MZmine 2.10 for peak picking, deconvolution, deisotoping, alignment and formula prediction 11. The database used for the identification of compounds was the Dictionary of Natural Products (DNP) 2015.