Effortless extraction of individual lipid moieties from lipidomics datasets: Liputils, a Python module

Abstract

Background and Aims: Lipidomic analyses tackle the problem of characterizing the lipid components of given cells, tissues and organisms by means of chromatographic separations coupled to high-resolution, tandem mass spectrometry analyses. Like other -omic techniques, lipidomic analyses have rapidly transitioned from a niche commodity to a widespread tool. A number of software tools have been developed to help in the daunting task of mass spectrometry signal processing and cleaning, peak analysis and compound identification, and a typical finished lipidomic dataset contains hundreds to thousands of individual molecular lipid species.