Toward fingerprinting cellular lipidomes directly from biological samples by two-dimensional electrospray ionization mass spectrometry

Cellular lipids are composed of linear combinations of aliphatic chains covalently attached to backbones and/or head groups that collectively represent the cellular lipidome. Herein we present a novel two-dimensional electrospray ionization mass spectrometric approach to fingerprint most of the major and many of the minor lipid classes in the hepatic cellular lipidome, which collectively represent >80% of the total lipid mass, directly from their chloroform extracts. Through lipid class-selective intrasource ionization and subsequent analysis of two-dimensional cross-peak intensities, the chemical identity and mass composition of individual molecular species of most mouse hepatic lipid classes were determined from its chloroform extract. This new integrated platform provides a robust foundation for the automated analysis of multidimensional mass spectra to advance the level of analytical scripting in lipidomics to a new plateau.