Data Analysis in Untargeted Lipidomics

Abstract

Recent advances in untargeted lipidomics using mass spectrometry have enabled one to grasp >1,000 lipid molecules from a single specimen. This is largely because of the development of analytical chemistry and its informatics (computational mass spectrometry) research. With other omics data such as transcriptome, the biological importance of various lipids has been revealed. Moreover, untargeted lipidomics can be applied not only in basic science, but also in a wide range of fields, such as biomarker discovery in clinical study and functional analysis in food science. In this review article, we focus on the data analysis part of the untargeted lipidomics workflow and provide the fruitful information to help readers who are interested in starting lipid metabolome analysis. This review contains (1) data processing guideline to extract the lipid profile information from mass spectrometry data, (2) standardization of untargeted lipidomics data, and (3) biological interpretation of lipidomics data by using ontology analysis and pathway analysis.