Diagnostic filtering to screen polycyclic polyprenylated acylphloroglucinols from Garcinia oblongifolia by ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography coupled with ion mobility quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry

A novel multistage MS approach, insource collision-induced dissociation (CID) combined with Time Aligned Parallel (TAP) fragmentation, was established to study the fragmentation behavior of polycyclic polyprenylated acylphloroglucinols (PPAPs), which could provide a more reliable fragmentation relationship between precursor and daughter ions. The diagnostic ions for different subtypes of PPAPs and their fragmentation behaviors have been summarized. Moreover, a new and reliable multidimensional analytical workflow that combines ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC), data-independent mass spectrometry (MS^E), and tandem MS with ion mobility (IM) has been optimized and established for the analysis of PPAPs in the plant Garcinia oblongifolia by diagnostic filtering. Diagnostic fragment ions were used to selectively screen PPAPs from extracts, whereas IM coupled to MS was used to maximize the peak capacity. Under the optimized UHPLC-IM-MS^E and UHPLC-IM-MS/MS method, 140 PPAPs were detected from the crude extract of G. oblongifolia, and 10 of them were unambiguously identified by comparing them to the reference compounds. Among those PPAPs, 7 pairs of coeluting isobaric PPAPs that were indistinguishable by conventional UHPLC-HRMS alone, were further resolved using UHPLC-IM-MS. It is anticipated that the proposed method will be extended to the rapid screening and characterization of the other targeted or untargeted compounds, especially these coeluting isomers in complex samples.