Mass Spectrometry of Coumarins
One of the first research areas in addition to the synthesis of coumarins in the PI’s career was mass spectrometry (MS). As natural compounds, coumarins need to be identified and quantified from mixtures like essential oils, herbal infusions etc. The aim of the early MS studies of coumarins was to create a tool for identifying different substitutions of coumarins. This was carried out by developing different methods to identify fragmentation patterns in Collision Induced Dissociation mass specrtometru (CID-MS). Most of the different isomeric coumarins showed different fragmentation patterns and by using computational quantum chemistry, we wera able to draw several fragmentation apathways and putative reaction mechanisms for them.[1,2]
In addition to the synthesis of coumarins, one of the first research areas in Juri Timonen’s, the principal investigators, career was mass spectrometry (MS). As natural compounds, coumarins need to be identified and quantified from mixtures, i.e. essential oils, herbal infusions, etc. The aim of the early MS studies of coumarins was to create a tool for identifying different substitutions of coumarins. This was carried out by developing different methods to identify fragmentation patterns in Collision Induced Dissociation MS (CID-MS). Most of the different isomeric coumarins revealed different fragmentation patterns. Utilizing computational quantum chemistry, we were able to draw several fragmentation pathways and putative reaction mechanisms for these fragmentation pathways. [1,2]
Mass spectrometry was also used to identify different metabolites of some natural coumarins in our recent study on coumarin metabolism. In the study, several coumarins (e.g. scoparone, isoscoparone, scopoletin, and isoscopoletin), their glucuronides, and numerous other metabolites were identified according to their exact masses and retention times with HPLC-MS. [3]
[1] Timonen, J., et al. (2009), Eur. J. Mass Spec., 15(5), 595-603.
[2] Timonen, J., et al. (2013), Rapid Commun. Mass Spec., 27(23), 2665-2675.
[3] Juvonen, R. O., et al. (2019), Planta medica, 85(6), 453-464.