Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry

, Volume 405, Issue 4, pp 1257–1266 | Cite as

Simultaneous determination of 24 or more acidic and alkaline phytohormones in femtomole quantities of plant tissues by high-performance liquid chromatography–electrospray ionization–ion trap mass spectrometry

Original Paper
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Abstract

Phytohormones act at relatively low concentrations as major regulatory factors of plant growth and development, and cross talk of phytohormones is currently of great interest throughout the plant science community. To meet this demand, a method that is capable of simultaneously analyzing diverse plant hormones is essential. This paper introduces a high-performance liquid chromatographic separation technique coupled with sensitive and selective ion trap mass spectrometry to simultaneously determine 24 or more acidic and alkaline phytohormones, including auxin, cis- and trans-abscisic acid, 11 cytokinins, and 10 gibberellins, in a single injection of sample. A binary solid-phase extraction using Oasis MCX cartridges for cations and Oasis MAX cartridges for anions was used to prepurify more than 24 acidic and alkaline phytohormones from a single plant extract. The method showed good linearity for all 24 phytohormones with R 2 values ranging from 0.9903 to 0.9997. Limits of detection for most of the phytohormones were in the femtomole range with some extending into the sub-femtomole range. This method was applied to hundreds of plant samples comprising different tissues from various plants, including herbaceous, woody climbing, and woody plants to demonstrate feasibility and to validate the methodology.

Keywords

HPLC–ESI–MSn Phytohormone Solid-phase extraction Plant sample 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

For this work, Dr. Xiangning Jiang was jointly supported by the National High Technology Research and Development (863 Program 2011AA100203) and the National Natural Science Foundation Project (grant no. 30630053), and Dr. Ying Gai by the Project of Beijing Forestry University Young Scientist Fund (no. 2010BLX03). Shichang Liu and Weiqi Chen contributed equally to this work.

Supplementary material

216_2012_6509_MOESM1_ESM.pdf (390 kb)
ESM 1 (PDF 389 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.College of Life Sciences and BiotechnologyBeijing Forestry UniversityBeijingChina
  2. 2.The Tree and Ornamental Plant Breeding and Biotechnology Laboratory of the Chinese Forestry AdministrationNational Engineering Laboratory for Tree BreedingBeijingChina
  3. 3.Institute of Genetics and Developmental BiologyChinese Academy of SciencesBeijingChina

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