Investigation of isomeric flavanol structures in black tea thearubigins using ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled to hybrid quadrupole/ion mobility/time of flight mass spectrometry.

Ultra performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) when coupled to ion mobility (IMS)/orthogonal acceleration time of flight mass spectrometry is a suitable technique for analyzing complex mixtures such as the black tea thearubigins. With the aid of this advanced instrumental analysis, we were able to separate and identify different isomeric components in the complex mixture which could previously not be differentiated by a conventional high performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry. In this study, the difference between isomeric structures theasinensins, proanthocyanidins B-type and rutin (quercetin-3O-rutinoside) were studied, and these are present abundantly in many botanical sources. The differentiation between these structures was accomplished according to their acquired mobility drift times differing from the traditional investigations in mass spectrometry, where calculation of theoretical collisional cross sections allowed assignment of the individual isomeric structures. The present work demonstrates UPLC-IMS-MS as an efficient technology for isolating and separating isobaric and isomeric structures existing in complex mixtures discriminating between them according to their characteristic fragment ions and mobility drift times. Therefore, a rational assignment of isomeric structures in many phenolic secondary metabolites based on the ion mobility data might be useful in mass spectrometry-based structure analysis in the future.