Annotation of phospholipids in mass spectrometry-based metabolomics

Phospholipids play numerous roles in biological systems, including the formation of membrane lipid bilayers and the signaling of multiple biological pathways, so that their dyshomeostasis have been associated with the development of multiple diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. Metabolomics based on mass spectrometry has been largely employed to investigate these disease-related perturbations in the phospholipidome. However, the annotation of discriminant features still remains as a major bottleneck in the metabolomic pipeline. Chemical standards of individual phospholipid species are normally not commercially available due to the large number of isomers, so the knowledge of their characteristic fragmentation patterns upon tandem mass spectrometry is of great utility for their annotation (1). In this work, we provide a simplified guideline for the MS/MS-based identification of the most important phospholipid classes and their fatty acid composition.

(1) R. González-Domínguez. Metabolomic approaches for phospholipid analysis: advances and challenges. Bioanalysis 10 (2018) 1069-1071