FlavonQ: An Automated Data Processing Tool for Profiling Flavone and Flavonol Glycosides with Ultra-High-Performance Liquid Chromatography–Diode Array Detection–High Resolution Accurate Mass–Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

Profiling flavonoids in natural products poses a great challenge due to the diversity of flavonoids, the lack of commercially available standards, and the complexity of plant matrixes. The increasingly popular use of ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection-high resolution accurate mass-mass spectrometry (UHPLC-HRAM-MS) for the analysis of flavonoids has provided more definitive information but also vastly increased amounts of data. Thus, mining of the UHPLC-HRAM-MS data is a very daunting, labor-intensive, and expertise-dependent process. An automated data processing tool, FlavonQ, was developed that can transfer field-acquired expertise into data analysis and facilitate flavonoid research. FlavonQ is an "expert system" designed for automated data analysis of flavone and flavonol glycosides, two important subclasses of flavonoids. FlavonQ is capable of data format conversion, peak detection, flavone and flavonol glycoside peak extraction, flavone and flavonol glycoside identification, and production of quantitative results. An expert system was applied to the determination of flavone and flavonol glycosides in nine different plants with an average execution time of less than 1 min. The results obtained by FlavonQ were in good agreement with those determined conventionally by a flavonoid expert.

Antitumor and immunomodulatory activities of total flavonoids extract from persimmon leaves in H22 liver tumor-bearing mice

“…Persimmon leaves are known to contain high levels of flavone and flavonol glycosides, which have characteristic UV-Vis absorbance at around 354 nm 19 ; therefore 354 nm was used as the main acquisition wavelength in the UHPLC-PDA analysis. Eight flavone and flavonol glycoside reference standards and the PLF extract was analyzed by using UHPLC-PDA-ESI/MS n method, and their representative UV-Vis chromatograms at 354 nm are shown in Fig.…”

A computational tool for accelerated analysis of oligomeric proanthocyanidins in plants

“…The computer program used for data processing in this work was developed based on FlavonQ (Zhang et al, 2015). …”

“…Each UV-vis spectrum was normalized to unit vector length before the comparison (Zhang and Harrington, 2013, 2015). The comparison is expressed by the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (Zhang et al, 2015). The non-PA peaks are eliminated by a user-adjustable threshold for the similarity analysis.…”

Chemical Analysis Program for the Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry System

“…to transform time of flight spectrum to mass spectrum to use m/z ratio for further spectral analysis [25]. For calibration, the user has to select two known peaks (H + and C + or CH 3 + peaks) to calculate constant a and b to convert all time points to m/z ratio.…”