Recent advances in analytical strategies for mass spectrometry-based lipidomics

Lipids are vital biological molecules and play multiple roles in cellular function of mammalian organisms such as cellular membrane anchoring, signal transduction, material trafficking and energy storage. Driven by the biological significance of lipids, lipidomics has become an emerging science in the field of omics. Lipidome in biological systems consists of hundreds of thousands of individual lipid molecules that possess complex structures, multiple categories, and diverse physicochemical properties assembled by different combinations of polar headgroups and hydrophobic fatty acyl chains. Such structural complexity poses a huge challenge for comprehensive lipidome analysis. Thanks to the great innovations in chromatographic separation techniques and the continuous advances in mass spectrometric detection tools, analytical strategies for lipidomics have been highly diversified so that the depth and breadth of lipidomics have been greatly enhanced. This review will present the current state of mass spectrometry-based analytical strategies including untargeted, targeted and pseudotargeted lipidomics. Recent typical applications of lipidomics in biomarker discovery, pathogenic mechanism and therapeutic strategy are summarized, and the challenges facing to the field of lipidomics are also discussed.
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Highlights • The diversified mass spectrometry (MS)-based untargeted, targeted and pseudotargeted strategies have greatly enhanced lipidomics applications. • Recent advances in MS techniques allow reliable and sensitive detection of hundreds to thousands of lipids. • The integration of multi-omics analytical techniques has a bright prospect in studying the pathogenic mechanism and potentially targetable therapy. • Comprehensive analysis of the lipidome still faces considerable challenges in analytical techniques.