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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Plant Metabolism and Chemodiversity

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1656532

This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancements in Mass Spectrometry for Plant Metabolomics ResearchView all 7 articles

Analysis and Identification of Coumarins in Different Parts of Chimonanthus salicifolius and Biosynthetic Pathways Prediction

Provisionally accepted
Yu  JiangYu Jiang1Xinhua  MaXinhua Ma2Mimi  XuMimi Xu2Tinghui  XieTinghui Xie1Yingpeng  TongYingpeng Tong3*
  • 1Taizhou Vocational College of Science and Technology, Taizhou, China
  • 2Zhejiang Hisun Pharmaceutical Co Ltd, Taizhou, China
  • 3Taizhou University, Taizhou, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Chimonanthus salicifolius is a medicine-food homology plant in China with a long application history and various metabolites. However, there is currently a lack of innovative research of analytical approaches on secondary metabolites and integrated study on the chemical compounds of different parts in C. salicifolius. It is highly necessary to develop a novel workflow for rapidly screening and identifing metabolites, which will support material basis research for subsequently exploring the applications in fields of food and pharmaceutics of C. salicifolius. An approach combined identification of in-house library and feature based molecular networking (FBMN) with characteristic fragment ions and neutral losses was employed to analyze the secondary metabolites in the different parts of C. salicifolius. A total of 200 compounds were identified, of which 69.04% were automatically annotated using self-built R script, effectively accelerating the identification of target compounds, and significantly improving the efficiency of compound structure annotation. The biosynthetic pathway of coumarins was predicted on basis of the identified compounds. Subsequently, a remarkable distinction of metabolites was observed from the shells of seed, leaves and seeds compared to the roots and branches, followed by a relatively minor disparity from branches and roots through PCA analysis and PLS-DA analysis. It was revealed in the heatmap that coumarins, flavonoids, terpenoids, atty acids and cinnnamic aicds were abundant in the leaves of C. salicifolius, providing material basis for subsequent pharmacological research.

Keywords: Chimonanthus salicifolius, Different parts, UHPLC-ESI-Q-MS/MS, Coumarins, biosynthetic pathway

Received: 30 Jun 2025; Accepted: 06 Oct 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Jiang, Ma, Xu, Xie and Tong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Yingpeng Tong, fish166@126.com

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