Liquid chromatography-mass spectroscopy and liquid chromatography-ultraviolet/visible photodiode array analysis of selected colchicum species.

An in-house strategy to dereplicate colchicinoid alkaloids was recently developed by our team. It aimed at quickly identifying Colchicum constituents using LC-MS (liquid chromatography-mass spectroscopy) and LC-UV/Vis PDA (liquid chromatography-ultraviolet/ visible photodiode array) techniques. In this project, our goal was to validate the developed method through analysing the alkaloid-rich fractions of three Colchicum species that had been previously studied phytochemically using the traditional bioactivity-guided fractionation methodology. The analysed species were Colchicum tauri Siehe ex Stefanoff, Colchicum stevenii Kunth, and Colchicum tunicatum Feinbr., all belonging to the family Colchicaceae. In addition to identifying the compounds previously isolated and characterized by the traditional methodology, the new strategy succeeded in tentatively identifying a set of known compounds, but new to the species.