Mass spectrometry of underivatized naturally occurring glycosides

Mass spectrometry is essential for the structure determination of naturally occurring glycosides. Molecular weight and sugar sequence information can be obtained. Development of “soft” ionization techniques has allowed a direct mass spectrometric investigation of underivatized glycosides. Numerous different and complementary methods of ionization have been used for their study. For a given compound, the choice of a particular technique is crucial in order to obtain the structural information needed. A brief survey of these ionization techniques is given, together with examples of their use in major classes of plant glycosides.