Metabolomic Fingerprinting of Romaneschi Globe Artichokes by NMR Spectroscopy and Multivariate Data Analysis

Introduction : Globe artichoke (Cynara cardunculus L. var. scolymus L. Fiori) and cardoon (Cynara cardunculus L. var. altilis DC) are sources of nutraceuticals and bioactive compds. Objectives : To apply a NMR metabolomic fingerprinting approach to Cynara cardunculus heads to obtain simultaneous identification and quantitation of the major classes of org. compds. Methodol. : The edible part of 14 Globe artichoke populations, belonging to the Romaneschi varietal group, were extd. to obtain apolar and polar org. exts. The anal. was also extended to one species of cultivated cardoon for comparison. The 1H-NMR of the exts. allowed simultaneous identification of the bioactive metabolites whose quantitation have been obtained by spectral integration followed by principal component anal. (PCA). Results : Apolar org. exts. were mainly based on highly unsatd. long chain lipids. Polar org. exts. contained org. acids, amino acids, sugars (mainly inulin), caffeoyl derivs. (mainly cynarin), flavonoids, and terpenes. The level of nutraceuticals was found to be highest in the Italian landraces Bianco di Pertosa zia E and Natalina while cardoon showed the lowest content of all metabolites thus confirming the genetic distance between artichokes and cardoon. Conclusion : Metabolomic approach coupling NMR spectroscopy with multivariate data anal. allowed for a detailed metabolite profile of artichoke and cardoon varieties to be obtained. Relevant differences in the relative content of the metabolites were obsd. for the species analyzed. This work is the first application of 1H-NMR with multivariate statistics to provide a metabolomic fingerprinting of Cynara scolymus. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [on SciFinder(R)