A rapid GC–MS method for the simultaneous determination of serotonin and resveratrol using characteristic ions: investigating the distributions of target compounds in different organs of sea buckthorn

A rapid, accurate and low-cost detection method for simultaneous qualitative and quantitative analyses of serotonin and resveratrol was established with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS) combined with ultrasonic solvent extraction. With the optimal extraction conditions (60 min, 60 ℃, 80% ethanol solution and 1:200 w/v) and silane treatment, mass chromatograms (MC) were extracted from total ion chromatograms (TIC) using characteristic ions from silanized serotonin (m/z 174 and 218) and resveratrol (m/z 444) for qualitative and quantitative analyses. There were good linear relationships between the peak areas of the target compounds and their concentrations in the ranges 50–1000 μg/mL and 0.05–2.5 μg/mL, respectively, and the correlation coefficients (R 2 ) were higher than 0.99. The relative standard deviation (RSD) was viewed as a measure of intraday and interday reproducibility, and those for retention time and peak area ranged from 0.005% to 0.09% and from 1.70% to 4.52%, respectively. The recovery levels for serotonin and resveratrol varied between 96.06% and 107.37%, between 94.82% and 101.09%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed method was used to detect the serotonin and resveratrol contents in different sea buckthorn organs from western China, and sea buckthorn branches and sea buckthorn growing in harsh environments may be excellent natural sources of serotonin and resveratrol, respectively.