Antioxidant activities and metabolite profiling of North American and neotropical blueberries using LC-TOF-MS and multivariate analyses

North American blueberry species (Vaccinium spp.) have been studied extensively for their potential health benefits due to their high levels of polyphenolic antioxidants. There are many neotropical relatives of the blueberries and recent studies have shown that some have even stronger antioxidant activity than the well-known North American blueberry. Fourteen antioxidant marker compounds were successfully predicted by applying multivariate statistics to data from LC-TOF-MS analysis and antioxidant assays of three North American blueberry species and tweleve neotropical blueberry species. This application of multivariate analysis to bioactivity and mass data can be used for identification of markers contributing to the pharmacological activities of natural products. Also, the compositional differences between North American and neotropical blueberries were determined by chemometric analysis of LC-TOF-MS data. North American blueberries formed a distinct profile from the neotropical species, and 44 marker compounds contributing to these differences were detected.