Abstract:
A rapid analytical method based on liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry was developed for simultaneous determining 11 Amadori compounds in flue-cured tobacco leaves. The relationships between the Amadori compounds and flavor types of flue-cured tobacco were studied by using multivariate statistic analysis including principal component analysis (PCA), hierarchical clustering heat map analysis (HCHMA) and
t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (
t-SNE). The results showed that: 1)There were good linear relationships for the 11 Amadori compounds with the correlation coefficients(
r)higher than 0.995. The limits of detection(LODs)were from 1.0 to 10.0 ng/mL, the intra- and inter-day precisions(RSDs)were 1.1%-4.8% and 2.9%-9.6%(
n=6)respectively, and the spiked recoveries of samples ranged from 87.8% to 110.2%. 2)The results of PCA and
t-SNE suggested that there was a clear classification trend for flue-cured tobacco of different flavor types, especially
t-SNE analysis. Via HCHMA, all the samples could be classified into eight clusters which corresponded to eight flavor types and were consistent with their production areas. 3) The determination and multivariate statistics of Amadori compounds provided technical insights into the flavor types and their production areas, useful to evaluate tobacco leaf quality and blend design.