Methods for quantification of cannabinoids: a narrative review

Abstract

Background Around 144 cannabinoids have been identified in cannabis plant, among them tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) are the most prominent ones. Because of the legal restrictions on cannabis in many countries, it is difficult to obtain standards to use in research; nonetheless, it is important to develop a cannabinoid quantification technique with pharmaceutical applications for quality control of future therapeutic cannabinoids. Method To find relevant articles for this narrative review paper, a combination of keywords such as medicinal cannabis, analytical, quantification and cannabinoids were searched for in PubMed, EMBASE, MEDLINE, Google Scholar and Cochrane Library (Wiley) databases. Results The most common cannabinoid quantification techniques include gas chromatography (GC) and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). GC is often used in conjunction with mass spectrometry (MS) or flame ionization detection (FID). The major advantage of GC is terpenes quantification however, for evaluating acidic cannabinoids it needs to be derivatised. The main advantage of HPLC is the ability to quantify both acidic and neutral forms of cannabinoids without derivatisation which is often with MS or ultraviolet (UV) detectors. Conclusion Based on the information presented in this review, the ideal cannabinoid quantification method is HPLC- MS/MS for the cannabinoids.

Cannabinoids—Characteristics and Potential for Use in Food Production

“…There is a clear need to develop effective and efficient cannabinoid assays. GC-MS is the most frequently used technique to determine cannabinoids; however, the quantitative determination of these compounds requires an additional derivatization process to prevent the decarboxylation of acidic cannabinoids [14,34,138]. HPLC-DAD and HPLC-UV constitute good alternatives to GC, but the specificity and sensitivity of these techniques are much lower than those of GC.…”

“…Researchers often analyze cannabinoids using LC-MS/MS, which can be used to determine both acidic and neutral compounds without affecting their structure and degradation degree [78,138].…”

Cannabidiol-Loaded Mixed Polymeric Micelles of Chitosan/Poly(Vinyl Alcohol) and Poly(Methyl Methacrylate) for Trans-Corneal Delivery

“…CBD after dissolution and spray-drying was quantified by the Beam test [48,49]. Briefly, a solution of 5% w/v KOH (Bio-Lab Ltd., Jerusalem, Israel) in absolute ethanol (Gadot, Netanya, Israel) was prepared and kept at RT until use.…”

Cannabis Cultivator Phenotype and Attribute Preferences in Legal Recreational and Medical Cannabis Cultivation Operations in Oregon and Colorado

“…Alternatively, the authors note that while modern farmers continue to use similar traits to their cannabis cultivating and breeding forebearers such as large trichomes and "desirable" aromatic terpenes, the advent of cannabinoid quanti cation methods such as gas chromatography and high-performance liquid chromatography have resulted in an uptick in growers cultivating strains with reproducible pro les of target cannabinoids and an overall high total cannabinoid content (Clarke & Merlin, 2016;Lazarjani et al, 2020). Though modern testing methods permit growers to assess non-THC and non-CBD cannabinoid contents [Cannabinol (CBN), Cannabigerol (CBG), Cannabichromene (CBC)] within cannabis which have also been found to have medicinal properties (Appendino et al, 2008;DeLong et al, 2010;Weydt et al, 2005), Clarke & Merlin (2016) propose that the pursuit of "high cannabinoid content" continues to predominantly refer to High THC and High CBD contents which are obtained by growers through a mixture of the "heritability of cannabinoid pro les, hybrid vigor between genetically distinct gene pools and the highly focused, human arti cial selection for potency (p.…”