Chromatography Forum

Hi all,

I have a question you could help me with:

If you had to guesstimate, approximately how much quantity of a substance would be needed to identify a powdered conglomerate compound, if one didn't know what to test for? (like say, a nutritional supplement that used 3-4 unconventional ingredients, some of them being impure herbal derivatives)

I'm going to jump in, and state "it depends".

For example, if a component (let's say for example) was BHT which has one structure, then very little would be needed for decent assay once one had determined that it was present. Now if another component was soybean oil, yeast, herbal derivatives made up of multiple chemical structures, then way more difficult.

Another question would be how accurate must such assays be? Sample preparation typically starts with homogenizing or mixing a sample to make uniform, then weighing. A tiny amount limits that.

Don't believe the old CSI show where they could identify positively the composition of everything in a drop of consumer product from a speck of material.

In my field of consumer products, we can determine tiny quantities of SPF chemicals or detergent fluorescent whitening agents, but cationic surfactants in a fabric softener are a whole different ball game...

Another "it depends" is what you mean by "identify".

If you just want to be able to say that herb so and so is present you might be able to look for a distinctive component of that herb, and not worry about the rest of it. If you want to chemically characterize all the hundreds of components in a herbal extract than you can take the rest of your life working through kilograms of material.

If you want to classify your material as being brand X of some type of supplement then you can go and buy a few different brands off the shelf (or from the darker recesses of the internet depending on what you are working on !) and simply run some fingerprint analyses to see what matches what. You could do that with milligrams.

Peter

In order to be above the LOD for the "unk" component, you'd need to at least be at the 1 microgram level. Ostensibly some level of sample prep will be required wherein you'll inevitably lose some of the query component.

Thank you for the responses, so from what I'm understanding, ~1400mg would be more than enough for any lab to easily discern the contents of said compound? (not including identifying specific herbal alkaloids, but rather just the plant origin of an extract, along with the other synthetic compounds)

Thank you for the responses, so from what I'm understanding, ~1400mg would be more than enough for any lab to easily discern the contents of said compound? (not including identifying specific herbal alkaloids, but rather just the plant origin of an extract, along with the other synthetic compounds)

If you have a specific target compound, and you know how to detect it then 1.4 g should be enough. "any lab" and "easily" are not so straightforward.

This begins to have the flavour of a dispute about lab performance, which brings up another "it depends"; are you buying or selling ?, are you the lab or the client ?, the boss or the analyst ?

Peter

Thank you for the responses, so from what I'm understanding, ~1400mg would be more than enough for any lab to easily discern the contents of said compound? (not including identifying specific herbal alkaloids, but rather just the plant origin of an extract, along with the other synthetic compounds)

If you have a specific target compound, and you know how to detect it then 1.4 g should be enough. "any lab" and "easily" are not so straightforward.

This begins to have the flavour of a dispute about lab performance, which brings up another "it depends"; are you buying or selling ?, are you the lab or the client ?, the boss or the analyst ?

Peter

I am neither- I'm actually in the process of designing a marketing campaign for a highly unique supplement product that has not yet been released, that uses a combination of both common and obscure ingredients. The effects are profound, and unlike anything currently on the market. The reason why I am asking, is that I have had investors ask to try a sample, then later requesting more or even entire bottles.

I know patents are useless in the supplement industry (add or take away an insignificant amt, or add an inert ingredient and its technically different), so I want to protect the formula prior to its release, so I have become hesitant about distributing further samples.

This is how my question came about- if someone with money liked my product, and wanted to take my idea and run with it, sending it off to san rafael labs, how much would they require to identify the contents...

Presuming that the obscure components account for the special activity, the "how much" question depends on how good your competitors background knowledge and industrial espionage is. A more important question is "how long will it take them ?" because if they can do it quickly they can have a product on the shelves before yours has built up a brand image.

In any case, as soon as the product hits the shelves any competitors who want to deformulate it will have more than enough to work with.

If your magic ingredients really are novel you might look into patenting their use in supplements rather than patenting the whole formula. A competitor who has the resources to deformulate a complex mixture probably also has the resources to grind down your defence of your patent though.

Peter