Molecular Networking and Dereplication: Facilitating Natural Product Analysis of Piper sarmentosum Leaves

Natural products are an important source of compounds for drug discovery and development but isolating a single pure compound from complex mixtures of phytochemicals can be a daunting task, especially in metabolomic studies. To address this issue, dereplication strategies are employed to quickly identify known phytochemicals prior to the isolation process. In our ongoing research, we have conducted a comprehensive phytochemical analysis of the methanol extract of Piper sarmentosum leaves using a mass-based dereplication strategy coupled with a molecular networking approach. The combination of mass spectrometry processing tools such as MZmine3, SIRIUS and GNPS revealed 28 clusters comprising of alkaloids, flavonoids, terpenoids, coumarins, lignans, monoacylglycerol and acid derivatives. We identified 61 constituents with piperidine alkaloids being the major components. The dereplicated compounds were validated using seven isolated compounds, which are 3-(4-methoxyphenyl)propanoic acid pyrrolidine (1), 3- phenylpropanoic acid pyrrolidide (2), cepharanone B (3), sarmentosine (4), isoasarone (5), trans-asarone (6) and magnosalin (7). The compounds were purified using preparative and recycling high-performance liquid chromatography. The comprehensive LCMS/MS profile hopefully will provide valuable insights into the phytochemical composition of Piper sarmentosum and demonstrate the effectiveness of the dereplication strategy in streamlining natural product analysis.

 

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Publication History

Article published online:
16 November 2023