Determination of proanthocyanidins in grape products by liquid chromatography/mass spectrometric detection under low collision energy

A method has been established for the identification of proanthocyanidins and quantification of individual monoproanthocyanidins using liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization-mass spectrometric detection (LC/ESI-MSD) for raw grape products. The separated monoproanthocyanidins and oligoproanthocyanidins were individually analyzed and identified by their molecular ion peaks using LC/MS. Using HPLC/ESI-MSD, the proanthocyanidin monomers, (+)-catechin (C), (-)-epicatechin (EC), (-)-catechin gallate (CG), and (-)-epicatechin gallate (ECG) in grape products were successfully quantified by LC/MS/MS detection of protonated molecular ions and characteristic fragment ions for each component under the optimized low collision energy level of 20%. For the investigated concentration ranges of C (21.88-11 200 ng/mL), EC (21.10-10 800 ng/mL), CG (36.72-18 800 ng/mL), and ECG (39.84-20 400 ng/mL), good linearities (r² > 0.99) for standard curves were obtained. Validation of this method showed an accuracy that was well below 15% and precision (RSD) within 8% for the four compounds. The method proposed here is simple, sensitive, and allows a direct sample preparation procedure. This is the first method that enables the determination of individual monoproanthocyanidins in grape products without any solid-phase extraction.