MS/MS fingerprint comparison between adjacent generations enables substructure identification: Flavonoid glycosides as cases

MS/MS spectrum matching currently serves as a favored means to identify the concerned metabolites attributing to the accessibility of several famous databases. However, the rule that takes the entire structure into account frequently leads to “0 hit” when inquiring MS/MS (usually MS2) spectrum in the databases. Conjugation plays an important role for the high-level structural diversity of metabolites in all organisms, and a given conjugate usually consists of two or more substructures. If MS3 spectra participate in database retrieval, the structural annotation potential of those databases should be dramatically expanded via identifying substructures. Attributing to the ubiquitous distribution pattern, flavonoid glycosides were deployed as the representative family to justify whether the primary fragment ion termed as Y0+, resulted from neutral loss of glycosyl residue(s), generated identical MS3 spectrum with MS2 spectrum of the aglycone cation namely [A+H]+. Because of owning unique ability to measure MS/MS spectrum with the exactly desired collision energy, linear ion trap chamber of Qtrap-MS was responsible for generating MS3 and MS2 spectra. When taking both m/z and ion intensity features into consideration, the findings included: 1) glycosides sharing identical aglycones produced the same MS3 spectra for Y0+; 2) isomeric aglycones generated different MS2 spectra; 3) MS3 spectra for Y0+ agreed with MS2 spectra of [A+H]+ when comparing paired glycoside and aglycone; and 4) different MS3 spectra for Y0+ occurred amongst glycosides bearing distinct, even isomeric, aglycones. Together, fingerprint comparison between MS3 and MS2 spectra could structurally annotate the substructures and further advance MS/MS spectrum matching towards the identification of, but not limited to, aglycones for flavonoid glycosides.