3-dimensional chromatographic approaches for screening of regulated plants in plant food supplements

Plant food supplements are becoming more and more popular in the Western world. This popularity can be explained by the trend of self-medication and the return to natural products, which are considered as less harmful. The increasing demand to plant food supplements makes these products vulnerable to fraud and adulteration. Detection of this swindle requires inventive approaches. An additional complexity is the fact that the plants are powdered prior to their incorporation in tablets or capsules, prohibiting macro- or microscopic analysis. When different plant species are mixed, the markers are also mixed, leading to complicated analytical challenges. The most promising approach is the use of chromatographic fingerprints combined with chemometrics. This combination is not yet fully explored. Indeed, already published studies apply traditional approaches using for example detection at a single wavelength. The general objective of this project is to develop a strategy to detect regulated or toxic plants in plant food supplements. The approach will be based on 3-dimensional fingerprints, meaning that data from different detection modes (like diode array and mass spectrometry) will be combined. This will yield huge data sets, which are necessary to properly differentiate between “good” and “bad” samples, but also requiring the correct software to handle these. Data will be subjected to various unsupervised and supervised chemometric techniques.