Dear Kholhring Lalchhandama

Plants are also a living thing.

I think you screwed up! While there are many plant molecules that have a physiological effect on humans, plant samples harvested by humans can be contaminated easily (ppb or less). Thus, extreme measures have to be taken in collection and harvesting.

Dear Kholhring Lalchhandama

Plants are also a living thing.

In GC-MS, NIST library will give you the maximum matching mass spectra pattern with your unknown sample mass spectra. So, you would get mpre than 100 matching compounds with maximum matching to minimum. Look at atleast top 10 matching compounds for your plant extract mass spectra. Base peak matching is more important.

Dear Kholhring,

This is clearly an issue of "mis-annotation/ mis-identification" owing to an enormously sized NIST library where all sorts of compounds (millions of spectra from compounds of human microbe and synthetic origin!) are there. So hits can mislead into believing their presence in plant samples.

Firstly, if the samples got contaminated with progesterone (and can be minused out) but then all other hormones are unlikely to be "flying in GC-MS" or get detected/ quantified- let alone identified from spectra. It needs expertise and stringent filtering criteria to get rid of these junky/ low-confidence hits. But, definitely is challenging for anyone.

You need to collaborate with experts and investigators who have done extensive work in GC-MS analysis from plants and otherwise to make sense of the data.

Do contact with follow up questions if it is necessary at your end.

Thanks,

Biswa