The Solid Phase Microextraction-Multi Capillary Column-Ion Mobility Spectrometry (SPME-MCC-IMS) for Measurement of Methyl Salicylate in Tomato Leaves

Plant hormones (PHs) or phytohormones are signaling molecules produced within plants that influence plant growth, seed germination, fruit maturation, and fruit ripening and control physiological processes including embryogenesis, regulation of organ size, pathogen defense, and reproductive developments. Methyl salicylate (MeSA), synthesized in plants from salicylic acid (SA), is a plant hormone that plays an important role in the resistance of plants to pathogens, thermogenesis in some flowers, and flower durability.

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is a fast, inexpensive, and sensitive technique with growing applications in the analysis of various classes of analytes. Furthermore, as there are different types of portable IMS, this technique can be used for the on-site analysis of compounds released from plants with fast repose time (few millisecond) indicating the importance of the development of IMS-based methods for chemical analysis in the field of agriculture, plant science, and food chemistry.

In this work, an IMS-based method was developed to exploit the advantages of SPME, MCC, and IMS for the fast and sensitive analysis of real samples in a complex matrix. The SPME−MCC−IMS method was employed for the quantitative
analysis of MeSA in tomato leaves.