I have seen in many papers that for plant phytochemical analysis using GC-MS people have used ribitol as an internal standard. But ribitol is already present in many plants.
So, can we use it for untargeted metabolomic analysis?
Your first step is such an analysis is to identify the presence or absence of potential internal standards. If ribitol is already present in your sample then it is unsuited as an internal standard. However, it is possible to circumvent this difficulty by the use of a stable isotope labelled internal standards (eg 13C, 2H or 15N).
Arabinitol which is a stereoisomer of ribitol is found in my sample. So, in that case can I use ribitol as an internal standard for GC-MS ?
It is hard to separate chromatographically (efficiently) sugar or sugar alcohol stereoisomers unless a convenient GC column chemistry is selected...Electron impact ionization and subsequent MS spectrums will also give identical spectrums. Arabinitol and ribitol will be overlapped and hence, ribitol is not suggested in this case....
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