Trace amounts of components in traditional Chinese medicine are considered pharmacological active substances used for treating many serious diseases. However, purifying all the trace substances and making clear their structures are not easy. In this context, high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with quadrupole time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometry based molecular networking was applied to investigate the chemical constituents of the roots of Aconitum kusnezoffii Reichb., which led to the identification of 33 nodes in different groups (N1-N33). Based on the excremental fragmentation pathway of known diterpenoid alkaloids (1-9) and comparisons of characteristic ions and characteristic loss of analogs in literature, the structures of unknown ions were deduced. This work lays a foundation for the evaluation of the clinical basis and mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine from the aspects of chemistry. In this paper, the method speculation of unknown natural products by means of molecular network method is expected to be applied in the discovery and change law of relevant active components in clinical pharmacology and the change of complex systems caused by trace active compounds.
Keywords: Aconitum kusnezoffii Reichb; diterpenoid alkaloids; molecular networking; traditional Chinese medicine.
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