Synthetic cathinone isomers exhibit very similar structure and physicochemical properties, which makes them unable to be effectively separated and identified, therefore increasing the likelihood of misidentification. In this study, the chromatographic and mass spectral characteristics of a sample by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS) were highly like those of N-ethylpentylone. The powder, however, was finally identified as dipentylone (also known as N, N-dimethylpentylone) by high performance liquid chromatography-linear ion trap-orbitrap mass spectrometry (HPLC-LTQ-Orbitrap-MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Because of the possibility of misidentification, the collision-induced dissociation (CID) and electron ionization (EI) pathways of dipentylone and its isomer N-ethylpentylone were further examined to assist forensic laboratories in identifying the synthetic cathinone isomers in their case work. The separation of the two isomers was successfully achieved through ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS). These results demonstrate that the methods developed in this study can be used to separate and identify the two isomers.

合成卡西酮异构体的结构和理化性质非常相似，这使得它们无法有效分离和鉴定，从而增加了误认的可能性。在这项研究中，气相色谱-质谱（GC-MS）样品的色谱和质谱特征与N-乙基戊酮非常相似。然而，通过高效液相色谱-线性离子阱-轨道阱质谱（HPLC-LTQ-Orbitrap-MS）和核磁共振（NMR），最终将该粉末鉴定为二戊酮（也称为N,N-二甲基戊酮）。由于错误识别的可能性，进一步检查了二戊酮及其异构体N-乙基戊酮的碰撞诱导解离 (CID) 和电子电离 (EI) 途径，以协助法医实验室在案例工作中识别合成卡西酮异构体。通过超高效液相色谱-质谱法（UHPLC-MS/MS）成功实现了两种异构体的分离。这些结果表明，本研究开发的方法可用于分离和鉴定两种异构体。