Appropriate choice of collision-induced dissociation energy for qualitative analysis of notoginsenosides based on liquid chromatography hybrid ion trap time-of-flight mass spectrometry

Liquid chromatography hybrid ion trap/time-of-flight mass spectrometry possesses both the MSn ability of ion trap and the excellent resolution of a time-of-flight and has been widely used to identify drug metabolites and determine trace multi-components in natural products. Collision energy, one of the most important factors in acquiring MSn information, could be set freely in the range of 10%-400%. Herein, notoginsenosides were chosen as model compounds to build a novel methodology for the collision energy optimization. Firstly, the fragmental patterns of the representatives for the authentic standards of protopanaxadiol-type and protopanaxatriol-type notoginsenosides were obtained based on accurate MS2 and MS3 measurements via liquid chromatography hybrid ion trap/time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The extracted ion chromatograms of characteristic product ions of notoginsenosides in Panax Notoginseng Extract were produced under a series of collision energies and compared to screen the optimum collision energies values for MS2 and MS3. The results demonstrated that the qualitative capability of liquid chromatography hybrid ion trap/time-of-flight mass spectrometry was greatly influenced by collision energies, and 50% of MS2 collision energy was found to produce the highest collision-induced dissociation efficiency for notoginsenosides. Addtionally, the highest collision-induced dissociation efficiency appeared when the collision energy was set at 75% in the MS3 stage.