Mass Spectrometric Studies of Flavonoids

Flavonoids are substances of vegetal origin, some of which are used as pharmaceutical compounds. We investigated the mass spectrometric behaviour of five flavonoids: silybinin, isosilybinin, silicristin, silidianin and taxifolin. Direct inlet system (DIS), LC-MS and fast atom bombardment (FAB) analyses were done on the parent compounds and other DIS and GC-MS analyses were run on derivatized flavonoids, to clarify their mass spectrometric behaviour. Deuterated derivatives were also used to confirm the major fragmentation pathways.