Goslin - A Grammar of Succinct Lipid Nomenclature.

We introduce Goslin, a polyglot grammar for common lipid shorthand nomenclatures based on the LIPID MAPS nomenclature and the shorthand nomenclature established by Liebisch and co-authors and used by LipidHome and SwissLipids. Goslin was designed to address the following pressing issues in the lipidomics field: 1) to simplify the implementation of lipid name handling for developers of mass spectrometry-based lipidomics tools; 2) to offer a tool that unifies and normalizes the main existing lipid name dialects enabling a lipidomics analysis in a high-throughput fashion and 3) to provide a consistent mapping from lipid shorthand names to lipid building blocks and structural properties. We provide implementations of Goslin in four major programming languages, namely C++, Java, Python 3, and R to kick-start adoption and integration. Further, we set up a web service for users to work with Goslin directly. All implementations are available free of charge under a permissive open source license.