A Triple Quadrupole and a Hybrid Quadrupole Orbitrap Mass Spectrometer in Comparison for Polyphenol Quantitation

Liquid chromatography coupled to
low-resolution mass spectrometry
(LRMS) has historically been a popular approach for compound quantitation.
Recently, high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) technical developments
led to the introduction of new approaches for quantitative analysis.
Whereas the performances of HRMS have been largely assessed for qualitative
purposes, there are still questions about its suitability for quantitative
analysis. Several papers on LRMS and HRMS comparison have been published;
however, none of them was applied to polyphenol quantitation. In this
work, a comparison between HRMS, operated in data-dependent acquisition
mode, and LRMS, operated in selected-reaction-monitoring mode, was
performed for polyphenol quantitation in wine. The two techniques
were evaluated in terms of sensitivity, linearity range, matrix effect,
and precision, showing the better performances of HRMS. The suitability
of HRMS for quantitation purposes as well as qualitative screening
makes HRMS the new technique of choice for both targeted and untargeted
analysis.