The use of a plant enzyme for rapid and sensitive analysis of naturally-occurring folates in food by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry.

A rapid, sensitive and reproducible method for analysis of naturally-occurring folates and folic acid in food has been developed and validated. A single-enzyme extraction step, in which a pure recombinant enzyme of plant origin (Arabidopsis thaliana) was used, enabled fast and reproducible deglutamylation during folate extraction within the incubation time of 1 h. Six commonly occurring folate forms (tetrahydrofolate, 5,10-methenyltetrahydrofolate, 10-formylfolic acid, 5-formyltetrahydrofolate, folic acid and 5-methyltetrahydrofolate) were detected and quantified in 9 min using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS).

Metabolic engineering of folate and its precursors in Mexican common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.).

Folate (vitamin B9) deficiency causes several health problems globally. However, folate biofortification of major staple crops is one alternative that can be used to improve vitamin intakes in populations at risk. We increased the folate levels in common bean by engineering the pteridine branch required for their biosynthesis.

GridMass: a fast two-dimensional feature detection method for LC/MS.

One of the initial and critical procedures for the analysis of metabolomics data using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry is feature detection. Feature detection is the process to detect boundaries of the mass surface from raw data. It consists of detected abundances arranged in a two-dimensional (2D) matrix of mass/charge and elution time.