Determination of the phenolic composition from Brazilian tropical fruits by UHPLC–MS/MS

• A highly sensitive, specific and fast method for the analysis of 22 important phenolic compounds in fruit pulps.
• Limit of detection (28.85–333.3 pg/mL) and limit of quantification (96.15–1111 pg/mL).
• The method was applied to tropical fruits (açaí-do-Amazonas, acerola, cashew apple, camu-camu, pineapple and taperebá).
• Contribution to chemical characterization of phenolic compounds from Brazilian exotic fruits.

Although Brazil is the third largest fruit producer in the world, several specimens consumed are not well studied from the chemical viewpoint, especially for quantitative analysis. For this reason and the crescent employment of mass spectrometry (MS) techniques in food science we selected twenty-two phenolic compounds with important biological activities and developed an ultra-high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC–MS/MS) method using electrospray (ESI) in negative ion mode aiming their quantification in largely consumed Brazilian fruits (açaí-do-Amazonas, acerola, cashew apple, camu-camu, pineapple and taperebá). Multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) was applied and the selection of proper product ions for each transition assured high selectivity. Linearity (0.995 < r2 < 0.999), limit of detection (28.85–333.3 pg/mL), limit of quantification (96.15–1111 pg/mL), inter- and intraday accuracy (>80%), precision (CV < 20%) and extraction recovery rate (>80%) were satisfactory and showed that the method provides an efficient protocol to analyze phenolic compounds in fruit pulp extracts.

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