A novel comprehensive strategy for high-thoroughly studying released compounds during the combustion process of herbs. A case study for Artemisia argyi Levl. et Vant

•We develop a novel strategy for comprehensively studying complex smoke samples.•A new smoke capture device is systemically designed to analyze involved compounds.•A GC-MS data analysis guided instrumental parameter optimizing method was proposed.•A combination with our AntDAS-GCMS can provide massive information of compounds.•Our strategy was used for studying compound variations in the smoke of TCM. The comprehensive study of compound variations in released smoke during the combustion process is a great challenge in many scientific fields related to analytical chemistry like traditional Chinese medicine, environment analysis, food analysis, etc. In this work, we propose a new comprehensive strategy for efficiently and high-thoroughly characterizing compounds in the online released complex smokes: (i) A smoke capture device was designed for efficiently collecting chemical constituents to perform gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) based untargeted analysis. (ii) An advanced data analysis tool, AntDAS-GCMS, was used for automatically extracting compounds in the original acquired GC-MS data files. Additionally, a GC-MS data analysis guided instrumental parameter optimizing strategy was proposed for the optimization of parameters in the smoke capture device. The developed strategy was demonstrated by the study of compound variations in the smoke of traditional Chinese medicine, Artemisia argyi Levl. et Vant. The results indicated that more than 590 components showed significant differences among released smokes of various moxa velvet ratios. Finally, about 88 compounds were identified, of which phenolic compounds were the most abundant, followed by aromatics, alkenes, alcohols and furans. In conclusion, we may provide a novel approach to the studies of compounds in online released smoke.