Detection of carbohydrates using a pre-column derivatization reagent 1-(4-isopropyl) phenyl-3-methyl-5-pyrazolone by high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray ionization mass spectrometry

A reagent, 1-(4-isopropyl) phenyl-3-methyl-5-pyrazolone (PPMP) has been synthesized and used for high-performance liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (HPLC/ESI-MS) determination of pre-column labeled carbohydrates. Monosaccharides have been quantitatively converted into mono-PPMP-labeled derivatives with 28% aqueous ammonia as a catalyst at 80 °C during 70 min. Mono-PPMP derivatives have been demonstrated to exhibit better chemical stability than bis-PMP ones. PPMP-labeled mixture of twelve monosaccharides (galactosamine, glucosamine, galacturonic acid, glucuronic acid, galactose, glucose/N-acetylgalactosamine, N-acetylglucosamine, xylose, arabinose, mannose, fucose, and rhamnose) has been well separated by a reverse-phase HPLC and detected by on-line ESI-MS method under optimized conditions. The data on characteristic fragment ions of the 13 PPMP-labeled monosaccharides with MS2 data have been collected. The suggested method exhibits good linearity (correlation coefficients > 0.9975) between the peak areas and the concentration of monosaccharides in a broad concentration range and good reproducibility (RSD < 3.19%). The developed method has been successfully applied to analyze the monosaccharide composition of natural Spirulina polysaccharide SPPB-1.