Today I'm going to be talking about determining cannabis terpene profiles using gas chromatography and comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography with high-performance time-of-flight mass spectrometry so with that I'm going to go ahead and get right into the meat of it here a little bit of background for the presentation we're going to take a look at which cannabis terpene types we're looking at look at the objectives look at some of the experimental methods such as the true terpenes sample prep the data acquisition and the data processing strategies then we'll dig into some of the results such as the compound characterization based on spectral similarities or retention index matches and mass Delta differentiation then we'll try to incorporate some of these strategies to actually differentiate the different cannabis strains in the plants that we looked at then we'll have a brief discussion and I'll summarize a little bit of background.

We know cannabis is a complex mixture made up of terpenes cannabinoids different flavonoids and among many other compounds it's been used for many many years at both for medicinal purposes as well as recreational purposes it's met its medical purposes include treatment of chronic pain multiple sclerosis epilepsy anxiety and cancer just to name a few its total composition is very important in determining its potency as well as its medicinal uses it uses this effect of its total composition has been described as the entourage effect which is it's the effect of all the different compound classes that may be present rather than just traditional characterization of the THC and cannabinoid content so just a brief summary here of some of the things that we're looking at the sum of the terpenoids and and buy terpenes limonene pining mere seen some of the synergistic cannabinoids such as cbn THC and CBD CBD THC and then CBN THC and CBD so a review of one of the journal journal articles that we pulled up is taming THC potential cannabis synergy and phyto cannabinoid terpene entourage effects so what we're really trying to accomplish in this study is to implement GC x GC to differentiate the chemical composition of cannabis to determine differences in different plant types and different cannabis products then we're gonna use processing software to quickly and confidently identify the compounds that make up these differences and then compare the cannabis strains based on this chemical map.

So I show two different contour plots here in this slide and it appears to be that based on these two analyses that we're able to differentiate differences in the two you can see in this particular region right here there there are differences in sample a whereas sample B does not have that particular class of compounds present so just to look a little bit at the sample preparation and the data acquisition strategy we received distillates from 23 different cannabis strains and over 40 different terpene standards from a collaborating test facility we received indica dominant strains set of a dynamic dominant strange and then a 50:50 hybrid mixture as well as some unknown terpenes for sale samples were simply diluted in isopropanol upon receipt receivable and then transferred referred to two milliliter GC vials for analysis the data was acquired on GC tof system as well as a GC by GC Tov system and all of the data acquisition and instrument instrument parameters were controlled with our software chroma tough here's a brief table of some of the instrument parameters we used a 7890 GC that was configured with leaked O's dual stage quad jet thermal modulator and an L pal three auto sampler we used a very small injection volume with a fairly high split ratio due to the high sensitivity of the instruments so we had to inject very little sample with quite a high split which is important because that minimizes the contamination of the GC part of the system.