Feasibility of UV–VIS–Fluorescence spectroscopy combined with pattern recognition techniques to authenticate a new category of plant food supplements

Abstract

Bud extracts, named also "gemmoderivatives", are a new category of natural products, obtained macerating meristematic fresh tissues of trees and plants. In the European Community these botanical remedies are classified as plant food supplements. Nowadays these products are still poorly studied, even if they are widely used and commercialized. Several analytical tools for the quality control of these very expensive supplements are urgently needed in order to avoid mislabelling and frauds. In fact, besides the usual quality controls common to the other botanical dietary supplements, these extracts should be checked in order to quickly detect if the cheaper adult parts of the plants are deceptively used in place of the corresponding buds whose harvest-period and production are extremely limited. This study aims to provide a screening analytical method based on UV-VIS-Fluorescence spectroscopy coupled to multivariate analysis for a rapid, inexpensive and non-destructive quality control of these products.

Pulsed Ultrasound-Assisted Extraction as an Alternative Method to Conventional Maceration for the Extraction of the Polyphenolic Fraction of Ribes nigrum Buds: A New Category of Food Supplements Proposed by The FINNOVER Project

“…The PUAE conditions have been optimized by a Faced Central Composite Design (CCD), whose results are shown in Table 1. The DoE response variable to be optimized was obtained by an untargeted spectroscopic method combined with chemometrics previously described by the authors [2,20]. Briefly each of the nine extracts, obtained according the experimental plan and spectroscopic analyzed, was described by a vector of 701 UV-Vis absorbances plus 701 fluorescence emissions, as a holistic nontargeted fingerprint 1402-dimensional of the corresponding extract.…”

“…A standard cell holder and a 10 mm quartz SUPRASIL ® cell with volume of 3.5 mL by PerkinElmer were used. The emission spectra were recorded in the range of 450–800 nm, exciting samples at a fixed wavelength (λ ex = 430 nm) [20]. Both the excitation and the emission monochromator slits were set to 10 nm, with high gain and 600 nm/min of speed.…”

“…Untargeted phytochemical fingerprints coupled with chemometrics [2,20], particularly the UV-Visible and fluorescence spectra of each extract as multivariate response variables, have been employed to quickly screen the best experimental conditions of PUAE investigated by the design of experiment (DoE) method [21]. Finally, the extract obtained by PUAE in the optimized conditions has been characterized using targeted phytochemical fingerprinting by HPLC [2,22,23] in order to identify and quantify the main polyphenolic compounds.…”

Bud-Derivatives, a Novel Source of Polyphenols and How Different Extraction Processes Affect Their Composition

“…A strategy based on the untargeted UV-Visible fingerprinting coupled to chemometrics (Principal Component Analysis—PCA) has been proposed for the screening of the polyphenolic BDs profile in order to obtain a rapid control tool [ 43 ]. Finally, HPLC methods were used to obtain a targeted chromatographic profile [ 7 , 44 ] of the main polyphenol classes (i.e., flavonols, benzoic acids, catechins, cinnamic acids).…”

Safety assessment of homeopathic medicines

“…In addition, according to the authors, the spectrophotometry method allowed estimation of the total concentration of the flavonols quercetin and its derivatives, the phytocomplex contained in the plant (Lombard et al, 2002). This is phytocomplexes, which provide a spectroscopic fingerprint analysis without chromatographic separation (Boggia et al, 2017).…”