New insights in the chemical profiling of major metabolites in different pigeon pea cultivars using UPLC-QqQ-MS/MS

As one of the major non-conventional edible legumes, different cultivars of pigeon pea have different uses according to their specificity. For the first time, the main phenotype and plant physiological parameters of ten different pigeon pea cultivars were evaluated in detail, and then a novel method using UPLC-QqQ-MS/MS has been investigated for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of eighteen active constituents originating from pigeon peas. After systematic optimization of MRM parameters, the developed method showed a good precision (RSD < 7.28%) and high recovery (91.27–113.62%) within 6 min. It was found that pigeon pea 11Y21, R7 and R10 exhibited superiority in contents of the unique active compounds of cajaninstilbene acid, cajanuslactone, longistylin A and longistylin C. Moreover, combined with the main plant physiological parameters, we can find that excessive plant growth may affect the metabolites content in pigeon pea. Meanwhile, the gene expression levels indicating that the metabolite profiles of different cultivars can be strongly influenced by genetic variation. Overall, the present work developed a valid method for the detection of various phenolic compounds, which could be applied for applicability and variety breeding of pigeon pea and also providing sufficient evidences for other utilization in the future.