Sublimation for Enrichment and Identification of Marker Compounds in Fruits

In this article, we describe the benefits of sublimation for natural product and food chemistry. The direct sublimation of substances from dried plant powders has not received much attention in research in the past, just like the sublimation of substances from dried plant extracts. We used sublimation to study dried sea buckthorn berry powders and dried sea buckthorn berry extracts. The results of the powder sublimations were compared to that of dried chokeberry, wolfberry, and European cornel powder. 52 marker substances of which 27 are specific for sea buckthorn were found in the sea buckthorn powder sublimates using LC/MS. The majority of them are not described in the literature and were obtained by direct sublimation. Accordingly, sublimation can help to identify new plant constituents. Our identification method was validated by the analysis of four commercially available fruit powders. The sea buckthorn powder showed an almost 80% correlation with the determined marker substances, whereas the other fruit powders did not achieve more than 38% correlation. The sublimates of sea buckthorn extracts show additional marker substances compared to the fruit powder sublimate, and we think that both techniques can be used to fight food fraud.

Automated summary

The benefits of sublimation for natural product and food chemistry were described in this article. Sublimation can help to identify new plant constituents and fight food fraud by studying dried plant powders and extracts.