Plants belonging to the Lippia genus have been widely used in ethnobotany throughout South and Central America and in tropical Africa as foods, medicines, sweeteners and in beverage flavouring. Various taxonomic problems involving some genera from Verbenaceae, including Lippia, have been reported. In this study, the metabolite profiling of fifteen extracts of various organs of six Lippia species was performed and compared using UHPLC–PDA-TOF-MS. Fourteen phenolic compounds that were previously isolated from L. salviaefolia Cham. and L. lupulina Cham. were used as references. The annotation of the remaining LC peaks was based on concomitant online high mass accuracy measurements and subsequent molecular formula assignments following these different steps: (i) elimination of non-coherent putative molecular formulae by heuristic filtering, (ii) verification of the occurrence of remaining molecular formulae in databases, (iii) cross search with reported compounds in the Lippia genus, (iv) match with reported UV spectra, (v) estimation of the chromatographic retention behaviour based on the log P parameter of reference compounds. This strategy is generic and time-saving, avoids isolation/purification procedures, enables an efficient LC peak annotation of most of the studied compounds and is well adapted for plant chemotaxonomic studies. Within this study, the interconversion of four flavanone glucoside isomers was additionally highlighted by analytical HPLC isolation and immediate analysis using fast UHPLC gradients. Dereplication results and hierarchical data analysis demonstrated that L. salviaefolia, L. balansae, L. velutina and L. sidoides displayed significant chemical similarities, while the compositions of L. lasiocalicyna and L. lupulina differed substantially.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	Lippia, dereplication, chemotaxonomy, UHPLC-TOF-MS, metabolite profiling, flavanone interconversion
Research Division:	Chemical Sciences
Research Group:	Analytical chemistry
Research Field:	Separation science
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding knowledge in the chemical sciences
UTAS Author:	Funari, C (Dr Cristiano Funari)
ID Code:	91086
Year Published:	2012
Web of Science® Times Cited:	50
Deposited By:	Austn Centre for Research in Separation Science
Deposited On:	2014-05-07
Last Modified:	2014-06-06
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