Analytical Techniques in Lipidomics: State of the Art

ABSTRACT

Current studies related to lipid identification and determination, or lipidomics in biological samples, are one of the most important issues in modern bioanalytical chemistry. There are many articles dedicated to specific analytical strategies used in lipidomics in various kinds of biological samples. However, in such literature, there is a lack of articles dedicated to a comprehensive review of the actual analytical methodologies used in lipidomics. The aim of this article is to characterize the lipidomics methods used in modern bioanalysis according to the methodological point of view: (1) chromatography/separation methods, (2) spectroscopic methods and (3) mass spectrometry and also hyphenated methods. In the first part, we discussed thin layer chromatography (TLC), high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography (GC) and capillary electrophoresis (CE). The second part includes spectroscopic techniques such as Raman spectroscopy (RS), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The third part is a synthetic review of mass spectrometry, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI), hyphenated methods, which include liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS), gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and also multidimensional techniques. Other aspects are the possibilities of the application of the described methods in lipidomics studies. Due to the fact that the exploration of new methods of lipidomics analysis and their applications in clinical and medical studies are still challenging for researchers working in life science, we hope that this review article will be very useful for readers.

KEYWORDS:

• Chromatography
• lipidomics
• separation methods
• spectrometry
• spectroscopy

Funding

This work was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science (INTER program 2014–2015; Kamil Jurowski grant – entitle: “Side effects of AIDS treatment – genes and lipids”) and by the National Science Center (Kamila Kochan, grant DEC-2013/09/N/NZ7/00626), the National Science Center (Cracow, Poland), no. NCN 2013/11/N/ST4/01838 (2014–2016), no. 2014/14/A/ST4/00641 (2015–2018) and no. NCBiR BIOSTRATEG-II/389/2015 (2016–2019). The authors would like to express special thanks to three reviewers for their very valuable, important and useful comments.