An automatic LC-MS/MS data analysis workflow for herbal compound annotation with AutoAnnotatoR: A case study of ten botanical origins of Fritillaria species.

Background: Despite the widespread implementation of analytical hardware capable of recording large-scale datasets for botanical natural products, the data processing procedures for compound annotation remain a bothersome obstacle that demand a tremendous amount of time and expert knowledge.

Methods: Herein, an automatic LC-MS/MS data analysis workflow with AutoAnnotatoR was introduced for the compound annotation of plant derived natural products, which has the merits of great efficiency, high accuracy, saving time and simplified process. This procedure enabled automatic matching of MS² data with characteristic fragment ions, as well as MS¹ data with compound libraries, which improves the accuracy of structural elucidation. Notably, the optimization of collision energy for each target ion was successfully performed for the first time, facilitating the acquisition of comprehensive fragmentation information.

Results: The automatic analysis workflow with AutoAnnotatoR was successfully applied for the annotation of alkaloids from 10 botanical origins of Fritillaria species. Consequently, a total of 2684 chemical constituents were tentatively characterized, with 23 components being unambiguously validated by reference standards and 2434 being probable novel chemicals.

Conclusion: The entire data analysis procedure takes only a few hours, vastly improving analysis speed while assuring high accuracy. This method provides a powerful tool for the rapid and precise annotation of complex natural products. The workflow is publicly accessible on Github as an open-source R package called AutoAnnotatoR (https://github.com/anyaling2022/AutoAnnotatoR).