A fundamental study of amadori rearrangement products in reducing sugar-amino acid model system by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry and computation

Abstract

It is crucial to characterize Amadori rearrangement products (ARPs) formed in the early stage of Maillard reaction, one of the most important modifications in food science. We setup a reaction model system using six selected amino acids (arginine, asparagines, glutamine, histamine, lysine and tryptophan) and their N-terminal acetylated forms with different reducing sugars for a fundamental study of Amadori rearrangement products. The effects on forming Amadori rearrangement products were studied by using electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). The reaction rate was affected by reaction temperature, reaction time, property of sugars and amino acids and the fragmentation mechanism of Amadori rearrangement products was illustrated by tandem MS (MS2) with collision-induced dissociation. The proposed fragmentation mechanism of Amadori rearrangement products in MS2 was provided based on MS2 data and it was supported by their computational data of density functional theory (DFT) at the B3LYP/6-31++G(d,p) level.