Detecting The “Un-Natural” In Natural Products Using Unifi Natural Product Application Solution

The wide spread use and increasing demand for herbal products as economical and perceived safe alternatives to prescription drugs has led to the increase of such products being adulterated with undeclared synthetic compounds by unscrupulous manufacturers. LC-MS based methods are widely-used for the characterization of the herbal product ingredients because of their high sensitivity and selectively for samples from complex matrices. However, from LC-MS sample acquisition to data processing/analysis to generating report with meaningful information, critical steps are required in order to effectively determine the answer. In this study, a commercial herbal product sample to relieve pain and inflammation obtained from a street vendor was analyzed using UPLC-Q Tof MS coupled to a novel informatics platform called UNIFI. A natural product analytical workflow within UNIFI was used to analyze the mass spectra of the herbal medicine which utilizes various tools such as a traditional medicine library and synthetic adulterant library and structure elucidation tool to effectively confirm the ingredients in the herbal product. From the UPLC/Qtof/UNIFI analysis, phenylbutazone and oxyphenbutazone were identified as adulterants. Here, we present a comprehensive streamlined workflow to quickly screen and identify the herbal ingredients and adulterants from a single LC/MS injection using UNIFI as a comprehensive informatics platform.