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ANANBIOANAL - 2010
LC/MS Application in the Drug Discovery
Magdy M. D. Mohammed
Pharmacognosy Department, National Research Center, Dokki, Cairo, Egypt
Pharmaceutical R & D Summit
doi:10.4172/2155-9872.1000071
L
iquid chromatography (LC) combined with mass spectrometry (MS) creates
an ideal analytical tool for the laboratory. The high-performance liquid
chromatography (HPLC) has been the laboratory tool of choice for separating,
analyzing, and purifying mixtures of organic compounds since the 1970s. An
HPLC column can separate almost any mixture that can be dissolved. A mass
spectrometer can ionize the separated peak solution and provide a molecular
weight for each peak component. An LC/MS/MS system can fragment the parent
ion into a distinctive fragmentation pattern and can separate the daughter ions for
identification and quantitation. The characteristic fragmentation pattern from each
parent ion can be identified by comparison to fragmentation patterns produced by
standard computerized databases. There are currently three principal application
areas in LC/MS, but the technique has much wider potential application and is in fact
already being applied to a variety of fields. The first main area is compound discovery
and identity confirmation in pharmaceutical manufacturing or drug discovery. The
second application area, called proteomics, is protein structure determination by LC/
MS. A growing subset of these studies is in the field of DNA/RNA structure studies;
although the name is not in common use currently, an appropriate term would be
nucleomics. The third area of application is in metabolite and trace contaminates
studies. Our main interest here is the compound discovery; anyone doing organic
synthesis or isolating compounds from biological sources has an interest, first, in
establishing the activity of the compound, then its molecular weight, and finally,
the compound’s definitive structure. In this study we will focus step by step on the
identification and characterization of new drugs from the medicinal plant Solandra
grandiflora using LC/MS.
ANALBIOANAL-2010
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