Chromatographic fingerprint analysis of secondary metabolites in citrus fruits peels using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry combined with advanced chemometric methods.

Multivariate curve resolution (MCR) and multivariate clustering methods along with other chemometric methods are proposed to improve the analysis of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) fingerprints of secondary metabolites in citrus fruits peels. In this way, chromatographic problems such as baseline/background contribution, low S/N peaks, asymmetric peaks, retention time shifts, and co-elution (overlapped and embedded peaks) occurred during GC-MS analysis of chromatographic fingerprints are solved using the proposed strategy. In this study, first, informative GC-MS fingerprints of citrus secondary metabolites are generated and then, whole data sets are segmented to some chromatographic regions. Each chromatographic segment for eighteen samples is column-wise augmented with m/z values as common mode to preserve bilinear model assumption needed for MCR analysis. Extended multivariate curve resolution alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) is used to obtain pure elution and mass spectral profiles for the components present in each chromatographic segment as well as their relative concentrations. After finding the best MCR-ALS model, the relative concentrations for resolved components are examined using principal component analysis (PCA) and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) clustering methods to explore similarities and dissimilarities among different citrus samples according to their secondary metabolites. In general, four clear-cut clusters are determined and the chemical markers (chemotypes) responsible to this differentiation are characterized by subsequent discriminate analysis using counter-propagation artificial neural network (CPANN) method. It is concluded that the use of proposed strategy is a more reliable and faster way for the analysis of large data sets like chromatographic fingerprints of natural products compared to conventional methods.