Hydrophilic interaction ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with triple quadrupole mass spectrometry for determination of nucleotides, nucleosides and nucleobases in Ziziphus plants

• An HILIC–UHPLC-TQ-MS for determination of nucleosides, nucleobases and nucleotides.
• Nucleotides could have good retentions and peak shapes with the proposed method.
• The method is simple, rapid and sensitive than the previous methods.
• The method was successfully applied to analysis of Ziziphus plants.

In this study, a rapid and sensitive analytical method was developed for the determination of 20 nucleobases, nucleosides and nucleotides in Ziziphus plants at trace levels by using hydrophilic interaction ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with triple-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry (HILIC–UHPLC-TQ-MS/MS) in multiple-reaction monitoring (MRM) mode. Under the optimized chromatographic conditions, good separation for 20 target compounds were obtained on a UHPLC Amide column with sub-2 μm particles within 10 min. The overall LODs and LOQs were between 0.11–3.12 ng mL−1 and 0.29–12.48 ng mL−1 for the 20 analytes, respectively. It is the first report about simultaneous analysis of nucleobases, nucleosides and nucleotides in medicinal plants using HILIC–UHPLC-TQ-MS/MS method, which affords good linearity, precision, repeatability and accuracy. The developed method was successfully applied to Ziziphus plant (Z. jujuba, Z. jujuba var. spinosa and Z. mauritiana) samples. The analysis showed that the fruits and leaves of Ziziphus plants are rich in nucleosides and nucleobases as well as nucleotides, and could be selected as the healthy food resources. Our results in present study suggest that HILIC–UHPLC-TQ-MS/MS method could be employed as a useful tool for quality assessment of the samples from the Ziziphus plants as well as other medicinal plants or food samples using nucleotides, nucleosides and nucleobases as markers.