biostudies-literatureUnknown33Wang LHThe quality variation of <i>Goji</i> berry across cultivated zones leaded to an urgent requirement of geographical discrimination. Classical untargeted to targeted strategy faced with the problem of reducing prediction capability. Here, a new untargeted to targeted transition strategy was proposed. At first, the AntDAS-GCMS was used for automatically resolving compounds in untargeted metabolic profiling data to initialize a biomarker set. Compounds with similar chemical structures and/or homologous metabolic pathways were introduced to enhance the coverage of biomarker set, which were used to construct an MRM-based targeted metabolomics method. Quantitative analysis revealed that, proline was dramatically higher in Gansu (252.31 ± 310.68 μg/g) than Ningxia (1.85 ± 4.56 μg/g) and Xinjiang (Food chemistry: X103549https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biostudies/studies/S-EPMC12853052biostudies-literatureA combination of automatic untargeted metabolic profiling analysis with targeted metabolomics to enhance geographical discrimination of &lt;i&gt;Goji&lt;/i&gt; berry.PMC12853052Liu PPWen YJZhang YLv YWang LHZhai MZhou HNLi SFYu YJWang WXZheng QXfalseA combination of automatic untargeted metabolic profiling analysis with targeted metabolomics to enhance geographical discrimination of &lt;i&gt;Goji&lt;/i&gt; berry.The quality variation of <i>Goji</i> berry across cultivated zones leaded to an urgent requirement of geographical discrimination. Classical untargeted to targeted strategy faced with the problem of reducing prediction capability. Here, a new untargeted to targeted transition strategy was proposed. At first, the AntDAS-GCMS was used for automatically resolving compounds in untargeted metabolic profiling data to initialize a biomarker set. Compounds with similar chemical structures and/or homologous metabolic pathways were introduced to enhance the coverage of biomarker set, which were used to construct an MRM-based targeted metabolomics method. Quantitative analysis revealed that, proline was dramatically higher in Gansu (252.31 ± 310.68 μg/g) than Ningxia (1.85 ± 4.56 μg/g) and Xinjiang (2026-01-01T00:00:00Z2026 Jan2026-06-19T04:59:47.358Z2026-06-19T03:07:24.707ZS-EPMC128530524162398110.1016/j.fochx.2026.103549