A novel sample preparation strategy for shotgun lipidomics of phospholipids employing multilamellar vesicles

The identification of lipids in biological samples is gaining importance. The advent of mass spectrometry-based lipidomics accelerated the field allowing nowadays for identification and quantification of complete lipidomes. However, due to solubility difficulties and varying properties of different lipid classes, sample preparation for lipidomics is still an issue. Of the many lipid classes, phospholipids are the major components of biological membranes. In solution, they spontaneously form lipid vesicles of various structures such as liposomes. They are therefore often used as membrane mimics when studying biological membranes and membrane proteins. Here, we present a novel sample preparation strategy for shotgun lipidomics employing liposomes prepared from lipid standards or lipid mixtures allowing the analysis of phospholipids directly from lipid bilayers. We validated our strategy for lipid identification by tandem mass spectrometry in positive or negative ion mode using different phospholipid species from various classes. We further tested our strategy for relative quantification by mixing different ratios of phospholipid species as well as determining the distribution of lipid species in a natural lipid extract. [Figure: see text] ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s00216-018-1113-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.