Probing the effect of sprouting Ajwain fruits using LC-ESI-FT-Orbitrap-MS based metabolomics

Trachyspermum ammi (L.), Carum copticum, commonly known as Ajwain (Apiaceae), native to Egypt; is known to possess different biological activities. It contains mainly thymol derivatives. Plant tissue culture provides a controlled supply of biochemicals. The objective is to study the effect of sprouting on the bioactive metabolites of T. ammi (L.). Ajwain fruits were divided into three groups; the first and the second groups were sprouted over a piece of cotton and over Murashige & Skoog's medium under aseptic conditions. The resultant sprouts were extracted separately using alcohol. The third group proceeded by culturing the green buds over the MS supplemented with phytohormones to initiate callus. The obtained samples analyzed using UPLC-MS- LTQ-Orbitrap in negative ion mode. Thirty-one peaks of different classes (flavonoids, caffeoyl quinic acids, coumarins and thymol derivatives) were putatively identified. Some valuable components such as furanochromones (visamminol, praeroside), dicaffeoylquinic acid, rosmarinic and feruloylquinic acids, and sinapic acid were detected for the first time in this species. Furthermore, glycosyringic acid was detected for the first time in the species T. ammi and in the family Apiaceae. UPLC-MS data were subjected to unsupervised (heatmap, PCA) and supervised (PLS-DA) models to gain a comprehensive understanding of both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of clustering tendencies in the samples The first model consistently clustered the five samples into three groups then the latter model demonstrated strong predictive power for unseen testing data and provided key insights into twelve peaks that may serve as potential chemical markers for distinguishing the five samples.