Solutions for OMICS – Untargeted and targeted lipidomics: from raw data to bio-pathways

Over the last two decades, lipids have come to be understood as far more than merely components of cellular membranes and forms of energy storage. Indeed, their pivotal role in a variety of diseases including diabetes, obesity, heart diseases, cancer, or neurodegenerative diseases, is now commonly accepted.  Consequently, lipidomics represents an emerging field with the aim of unravelling diagnostic biomarkers, new drug targets, and of rationalizing toxicity effects. Mass spectrometry, due to its sensitivity and selectivity, is the elected method for qualitative and quantitative lipidomics analysis, and the recent improvements in MS technologies have moved interest from targeted to untargeted approaches. However, untargeted lipidomics requires tailored software solutions for data analysis. To this aim, we recently developed Lipostar, a vendor-neutral high-throughput software to support targeted and untargeted LC-MS lipidomics. Lipostar supports the overall data analysis steps including raw files import, data mining, statistical analysis (including prediction), lipid identification, data interpretation of bio-pathways. During this presentation, a general overview of the software will be provided, together to hints and tips to adapt the software to your experimental protocols.