Investigation of ellagic acid sourcing as a dietary supplement by UFLC-PDA-ESI-MS/MS

Ellagic acid (EA)is a very common plant phenolic with occurrence in bark, stem, fruit or wood part in many plants. It occurs in nature either in a free or complex form like ellagitannins which further gets hydrolyzed in the body into EA and metabolized in to urolithins and its glucuronide. In this way, EA entered dietary supplement (DS) industry worldwide from last decade with diverse claims like antioxidant, immunity booster and digestive health.

The regulations for the DS globally have common requirement “authentication of botanical source as per label claim”. EA has been introduced in the DS industry from a potential source i. e. Punica granatum (PG). PG is a tropical fruit with biochemical markers as punicalagin A & B, punicalin A-B, gallic acid and EA. PG mainly contains gallotannins-ellagitannins class compounds which on hydrolysis convert to EA.

The current different methods have inability to confirm the sourcing of raw material from which EA have manufactured and varied solubility of EA in different solvents while analysis. Therefore, this research update solving this problem with optimization and validation of a simple, stable matrix-based sample preparation method created on UFLC-UV-PDA.

This method adapted for investigating the sourcing of botanical DS of ellagic acid from 10 potential sources other than PG with the help of ESI-MS/MS. Also, a fingerprinting of PG has been separately established for reconfirmation of its sourcing.

This study provides a valuable strategy for rapidly screening and identifying chemical components of PG and source identification of EA as DS.

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