Mass spectrometry-based approaches to assess the botanical authenticity of dietary supplements.

Dietary supplements are legally considered foods despite frequently including medicinal plants as ingredients. Currently, the consumption of herbal dietary supplements, also known as plant food supplements (PFS), is increasing worldwide and some raw botanicals, highly demanded due to their popularity, extensive use, and/or well-established pharmacological effects, have been attaining high prices in the international markets. Therefore, botanical adulteration for profit increase can occur along the whole PFS industry chain, from raw botanicals to plant extracts, until final PFS. Besides the substitution of high-value species, unintentional mislabeling can happen in morphologically similar species. Both cases represent a health risk for consumers, prompting the development of numerous works to access botanical adulterations in PFS. Among different approaches proposed for this purpose, mass spectrometry (MS)-based techniques have often been reported as the most promising, particularly when hyphenated with chromatographic techniques. Thus, this review aims at describing an overview of the developments in this field, focusing on the applications of MS-based techniques to targeted and untargeted analysis to detect botanical adulterations in plant materials, extracts, and PFS.

A UHPLC-HRMS based metabolomics and chemoinformatics approach to chemically distinguish 'super foods' from a variety of plant-based foods.

The aim of this study was to investigate if the declared benefits associated with superfoods are related to a specific molecular composition. For this purpose, untargeted metabolomics and molecular networking were used to obtain an overview of all features, focusing on compounds with anti-inflammatory, antioxidant or antimicrobial properties. 565 plant-based food samples were analyzed using UHPLC-HRMS and advanced data analysis tools. The molecular networking of the whole dataset allowed identification of a greater diversity of molecules, in particular, prenol lipids, isoflavonoids and isoquinolines in superfoods, when compared with non-superfood species belonging to the same botanical family. Furthermore, in silico tools were used to expand our chemical knowledge of compounds observed in superfood samples.