Tutorial on lipidomics

Abstract

The main stream of lipidomics involves mass spectrometry-based, systematic, and large-scale studies of the structure, composition, and quantity of lipids in biological systems such as organs, cells, and body fluids. As increasingly more researchers in broad fields are beginning to pay attention to and actively learn about the lipidomic technology, some introduction on the topic is needed to help the newcomers to better understand the field. This tutorial seeks to introduce the basic knowledge about lipidomics and to provide readers with some core ideas and the most important approaches for studying the field.

Towards precision medicine: defining and characterizing adipose tissue dysfunction to identify early immunometabolic risk in symptom-free adults from the GEMM family study

“…We observed a discrete trend for a postprandial increase in some plasma bioactive lipid species at 180 and 300 min on proinflammatory Ceramides (CERN20:0, CERN22:0, CERN23:0), Lyso Phosphatidylethanolamine (LPE18:1), and Lyso Phosphatidylcholine (LPC) (LPC20:3) classes in the symptom-free (L)ALR subjects. Of note, the multidimensional mass spectrometry-based shotgun lipidomics technique [57] has been widely used to identify altered lipid metabolism and biomarkers under pathophysiological conditions such as prediabetics and type 2 diabetics compared to otherwise healthy subjects [58]. Here we are presenting data on the normal variation among otherwise symptom-free individuals.…”

Mass spectrometry‐based lipidomics in food science and nutritional health: A comprehensive review

“…Evaluation of food raw materials covers not only freshness and safety, but also nutritional value. For example, our study (Wang, Zhang et al., 2019) based on UPLC‐Q‐TOF‐MS successfully detected differences in bioactive lipids, which were considered as potential biomarkers to distinguish different fish species and assess nutritional value, between marine (mainly C22:5) and freshwater (mainly C20:4 and C20:5) fish species.…”

“…Quadrupole‐time of flight (Q‐TOF) and TOF/TOF‐TOF also have high sensitivity. Linear ion trap has good sensitivity, while Fourier‐transform ion cyclotron resonance has medium sensitivity (Wang, Wang, & Han, 2019). The commonly used ion source and mass analyzer are shown in Figure 2.…”

“…If the data processor is inexperienced and chooses an inappropriate method, it can greatly compromise the method as a whole leading to bias and even erroneous results. Fortunately, the development of modern bioinformatics tools, including algorithm development, database creation and update, statistics information mining, and data visualization tools, has brought about promising future for lipidomics (Wang, Zhang et al., 2019). Food scientists have been working hard toward building a lipid database of food samples to meet the requirements of lipidomics analysis of specific food samples that are not met by commercial databases.…”

From Samples to Insights into Metabolism: Uncovering Biologically Relevant Information in LC-HRMS Metabolomics Data

“…As opposed to polar metabolites, a large body of evidence has demonstrated the value of direct infusion-based shotgun analysis for lipid identification. The latest strategies applied in shotgun lipidomics take advantage of the selective ionization of different classes of lipids in the ion source (i.e., intra-source separation under different conditions) and continuous direct injection of the sample, allowing for multi-dimensional MS analysis (i.e., multiple acquisitions in full scan and MS/MS scan modes), and thus, the unambiguous identification (including isobaric/isomeric species) and accurate quantification of lipid species (in two steps) [42,43]. Although the multi-dimensional mass spectrometry-shotgun lipidomics (MDMS-SL) improves most of the limitations related to classical shotgun lipidomics, it is relatively low-throughput and still suffers from ion-suppression, thus limiting the analysis of low abundant lipid species (unless they are derivatized) [43].…”