“Lipidomics”: Mass spectrometric and chemometric analyses of lipids

Lipids are ubiquitous in the human organism and play essential roles as components of cell membranes and hormones, for energy storage or as mediators of cell signaling pathways. As crucial mediators of the human metabolism, lipids are also involved in metabolic diseases, cardiovascular and renal diseases, cancer and/or hepatological and neurological disorders. With rapidly growing evidence supporting the impact of lipids on both the genesis and progression of these diseases as well as patient wellbeing, the characterization of the human lipidome has gained high interest and importance in life sciences and clinical diagnostics within the last 15 years. This is mostly due to technically advanced molecular identification and quantification methods, mainly based on mass spectrometry. Mass spectrometry has become one of the most powerful tools for the identification of lipids. New lipidic mediators or biomarkers of diseases can be analysed by state-of-the art mass spectrometry techniques supported by sophisticated bioinformatics and biostatistics. The lipidomic approach has developed dramatically in the realm of life sciences and clinical diagnostics due to the available mass spectrometric methods and in particular due to the adaptation of biostatistical methods in recent years. Therefore, the current knowledge of lipid extraction methods, mass-spectrometric approaches, biostatistical data analysis, including workflows for the interpretation of lipidomic high-throughput data, are reviewed in this manuscript.