The ability to detect adulteration or to verify the authenticity of
raw and processed agricultural products is a growing concerning
among manufacturers and consumers (Martin et al. (2009)). Pomegranate
containing products are not immune to these concerns and
a recent analysis of 27 products labelled as containing pomegranate
by HPLC (Zhang et al., 2009), for pomegranate phenolics including
punicalagin A and B, and ellagic acid, revealed that less than
20% of the tested products possessed the expected HPLC profile,
and five of the tested products contained no detectable levels of
pomegranate metabolites. The remaining products contained the
prerequisite pomegranate metabolites, but at concentrations that
were overshadowed by excessive ellagic acid levels, to which the
authors concluded were the result of adulteration to effect a higher
antioxidant content in the products. In their report, Zhang et al.
(2009) concluded that punicalagins A and B and ellagic acid, along
with punicalin, could function as sentinel metabolites for verifying
the inclusion of pomegranate in commercial products. The method
we have developed readily separates these sentinel metabolites
and we believe that this method provides a simple, rapid and effective
means to evaluate samples for the presence of pomegranate
metabolites.