Maximizing MS/MS Acquisition for Lipidomics Using Capillary Separation and Orbitrap Tribrid Mass Spectrometer

Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry
(LC-MS) is a typical strategy
for lipidomics analysis. Although capillary LC-MS is a common analytical
technique for proteomics analysis, its application to lipidomics has
been limited. In this study, we aim at improving lipid identifications
achieved in a single LC-MS analysis by a 3-fold approach: capillary
LC and nanoelectrospray for enhanced ionization, ion trap for higher
sensitivity tandem MS, and parallelization of mass analyzers for increased
speed of acquisition on an Orbitrap hybrid system. By applying the
methods to a complex lipid mixture of human plasma, we identified
and performed relative quantification on over 1500 lipids within a
60 min capillary LC-MS analysis.