Lipidomics is that the study of the structure and performance of the entire set of lipids (the lipidome) produced during a given cell or organism also as their interactions with other lipids, proteins and metabolites.
Lipids play an integral part in human physiology and exhibit a high degree of specialization in specific cellular compartments, functioning as structural components of membranes, as a medium for energy storage, as an anchor for proteins, as intra- and inter-cellular signaling molecules or as cofactors in modulating protein activity. A multitude of nutritionally and metabolically regulated processes maintain lipid homeostasis in healthy conditions. Defects or alterations in the enzymatic metabolism of lipids may contribute to the pathogenesis of common diseases , like Alzheimer’s disease , atherosclerosis , insulin-resistant diabetes , cancer , or schizophrenia . Thus, lipid biomarkers have potential applications in the understanding of mechanisms underlying disease pathogenesis, in the prediction of future disease risk and in monitoring the responses to therapies. Lipid researchers refer to the entire collection of chemically distinct lipid species in a cell, an organ, or a biological system as a “lipidome” .
With the development of “omics” strategies, the investigators in the lipid field recognized that they should investigate the metabolism of the entire lipidome in a systems biology approach . Lipidomics, a branch of metabolomics, was first placed forward by Han and Gross and is a lipid-targeted metabolomics approach aiming at the comprehensive analysis of lipids in biological systems as well as their interactions with other lipids, proteins and metabolites. Recent technological advancements in mass spectrometry (MS) and chromatography have greatly enhanced the development and applications of metabolic profiling of diverse lipids in complex biological samples, helping to unravel their diversity and to disclose their specificity in biological fluids and tissues and leading to the discovery of new potential biomarkers of pathological disorders.