Abstract
Lipids are a complex and critical heterogeneous molecular entity, playing an intricate and key role in understanding biological activities and disease processes. Lipidomics aims to quantitatively define the lipid classes, including their molecular species. The analysis of the biological tissues and fluids are challenging due to the extreme sample complexity and occurrence of the molecular species as isomers or isobars. This review documents the overview of lipidomics workflow, beginning from the approaches of sample preparation, various analytical techniques and emphasizing the state-of-the-art mass spectrometry either by shotgun or coupled with liquid chromatography. We have considered the latest ion mobility spectroscopy technologies to deal with the vast number of structural isomers, different imaging techniques. All these techniques have their pitfalls and we have discussed how to circumvent them after reviewing the power of each technique with examples..
Highlights
Lipids are a complex and critical heterogeneous molecular entity, playing an intricate and key role in many biological functions such as acting as structural scaffold for the cell membrane, serving as energy storage and participating in signaling pathways
Though it is an additional step, it offers several advantages, it enhances the ionization efficiency, selectively introduce a fragment which can be used in precursor ion or neutral loss scans, masks the functional groups that contaminate the mass spectrometer (MS), often encountered with the lipids containing phosphates and most importantly, it helps in differential quantitation by selectively introducing an isotopic label
An internal standard cocktail has been developed for the LIPID MAPS Consortium which is commercially available as SPLASH® LIPIDOMIX® from Avanti Polar Lipids for quantitative mass spectrometry analysis
Summary
Lipids are a complex and critical heterogeneous molecular entity, playing an intricate and key role in many biological functions such as acting as structural scaffold for the cell membrane, serving as energy storage and participating in signaling pathways. Lipid classification system is spearheaded by LIPID MAPS Lipidomics Gateway (https://www.lipidmaps.org/). Each category can be further classified into different lipid classes and subclasses, based on the number of carbon atoms and double bonds, the branching of the hydrocarbon chain, the position and orientation of double bonds, the addition of polar groups such as choline, inositol and ethanolamine; and glycosylation [2]. The LIPID MAPS structure database currently records 45245 lipid structures (as of 12 March 2020) (https://www.lipidmaps.org/). The complete lipid profile within a cell, tissue or organism is known as a lipidome and is a branch of the “metabolome”. Lipidomics is a discipline that studies the characteristics of lipid and to unravel the complex interactions of lipid metabolites in a biological system
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