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Updated: Aug 10, 2026

Technical Approach for Structural Analysis of an Unknown Compound in Huoxiang Zhengqi Oral Liquid based on Linear Ion Trap Mass Spectrometry
Published on: April 3, 2026
Cyanide trapping of iminium ion reactive intermediates followed by detection and structure identification using
Dayana Argoti1, Li Liang, Abdul Conteh
1The Barnett Institute and Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
Abstract:
Secondary and tertiary alicyclic amines are widely found in pharmaceuticals and environmental compounds. The formation of iminium ions as reactive intermediates in the metabolic activation of alicyclic amines has previously been investigated in radiometric assays where radiolabeled cyanide is typically employed. In this paper, we report a relatively high throughput LC-MS/MS method for the detection of the nonradiolabeled cyanide adduct formed in rat or human liver microsomal incubations via constant neutral loss scan followed by structural characterization using product ion scan on a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. A total of 14 alicyclic amine compounds were investigated with the cyanide trapping LC-MS/MS screen and also with the glutathione (GSH) trapping screen, a well-established and commonly employed technique for reactive metabolite screening. Our results are found to be in general agreement with the previous metabolism reports for these compounds, demonstrating the effectiveness, speed, and simplicity of the cyanide trapping LC-MS/MS method to study the iminium ion intermediates from alicyclic amines and its complementarities to GSH trapping method for reactive metabolite screenings.
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