Marching toward human lipidome project – Advancement of structural lipidomics

Comprehensive characterization of lipidomes is highly desirable for fundamental biological study as well as for disease biomarker screening. As highly complementary to the genomics and proteomics, lipidomics provides important information related to lipidomes and enables their correlations to genomes and proteomes. During the past few years, significant progresses have been made in instrumentation and analytical method for elucidating detailed structural features of lipids. In this review, the current status of the lipidomics with higher structural specificity is surveyed and its capacity as well as existing challenges are discussed in terms of supporting future human lipidome project, which is expected to be the next important step for human omics study.

This review discusses the rapid advancements in structural lipidomics and the required further developments in terms of supporting future human lipidome project. Specially, the section of “Analysis of lipids at higher structural specifications” details gas-phase ion dissociation techniques, large-scale lipidomics based on separation techniques, and bioinformatics for deep lipid structure analysis; the part of “Biomedical applications with structural lipidomics” demonstrates lipid metabolism study considering detail-structure isomers and discovery of lipid isomer biomarkers. As presented in the “Future perspectives and conclusions” part, future works include developing multi-level structural characterization, accurate quantitation of lipid isomers, and automated data analysis pipelines.