Abstract

Carthamus tinctorius L. (known as safflower) is a valuable oil plant whose importance is increasing rapidly in the world due to its high adaptation to arid regions. The seeds of this unique plant are especially used in edible oil, soap, paint, varnish and lacquer production. Its flowers are used in vegetable dye production and medicinal purposes beside its features as a coloring and flavoring in food. After the oil is removed, the remaining pulp and plant parts are used as animal feed, and dry straw residues are used as fuel. Beside all these features, its usage as a herbal medicinal plants for various diseases has gained importance on recent years. In this study, it was designed a plant metabolomic approach which transfers all the recent data processing strategies of untargeted metabolomics in clinical applications to the present study. Q-TOF LC/MS-based analysis of the extracts (70% ethanol, hexane, and chloroform) for both seed and flowers was performed using a C18 column (Agilent Zorbax 1.8 µM, 100 × 2.1 mm). Differences were observed in seed and fruit extracts and these differences were visualized using principal component analysis (PCA) plots. The total number and intersections of the peaks in the extracts were visualized using peak count comparison graph. Based on the experimental results, the number of the detected peaks for seeds was higher than the ones for the flowers for all solvent systems to extract the samples.