Planta Med 2019; 85(18): 1458
DOI: 10.1055/s-0039-3399820
Main Congress Poster
Poster Session 1
© Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York

LC-TOF-MS-based metabolomic fingerprinting of Rumex species

S Loos
1   Institute of Pharmacy, Pharmacognosy, CMBI, University of Innsbruck,, Innrain 80-82, Innsbruck, 6020, Austria
,
A Hartmann
1   Institute of Pharmacy, Pharmacognosy, CMBI, University of Innsbruck,, Innrain 80-82, Innsbruck, 6020, Austria
,
S Schwaiger
1   Institute of Pharmacy, Pharmacognosy, CMBI, University of Innsbruck,, Innrain 80-82, Innsbruck, 6020, Austria
,
H Stuppner
1   Institute of Pharmacy, Pharmacognosy, CMBI, University of Innsbruck,, Innrain 80-82, Innsbruck, 6020, Austria
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Publication History

Publication Date:
20 December 2019 (online)

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The genus Rumex, belonging to the Polygonaceae family, comprises 183 accepted species including subspecies [1], about 20 of them being native to Central Europe. Some species are commonly used as vegetable but are also relevant in traditional medicine and modern phytotherapy. However, macroscopic differentiation of species proves to be difficult due to high similarities in morphological features, needing a combination of traits from basal leaves and mature fruits for the unambiguous identification.

This study aims to simplify the discrimination of Rumex species by liquid chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC/TOF/MS) based metabolomic fingerprinting approach.

Accordingly, plant extracts of various species (R. acetosa, R. acetosella, R. alpestris, R. alpinus, R. conglomeratus, R. sanguineus, R. scutatus, R. thyrsiflorus, and R. patientia) and different geographic locations in Germany and Austria were analysed. The principal component analysis on a unit variance (UV) scaled dataset revealed clustering of samples according to their respective traditionally morphology-based subgenera. Orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) models were used to identify specific discriminative MS-features as putative markers for all species, especially for three morphologically almost identical species R. acetosa, R. alpestris and R. thyrsiflorus of subgenus Acetosa. In contrast to a recent phylogenetic study [2] which proposed to combine Rumex subgenera Acetosella and Acetosa, our results show a distinct grouping of all species of subgenus Acetosa, whereas the cluster of R. acetosella samples is isolated, suggesting that R. acetosella is a separate subgenus at a chemotaxonomic level.