High Throughput Identification and Quantification of Phospholipids in Complex Mixtures

We present a fully automatic method, autoP, for identification and quantification of lipids in complex lipid mixtures from 1D 31P and 2D 1H–31P NMR spectra. The 31P chemical shifts in lipids are highly sensitive to experimental conditions such as pH and temperature, so the present method uses the much more unambiguous 1H chemical shifts for assignment and 31P intensities for quantification. By using 2D 1H–31P total correlation spectroscopy (TOCSY) correlation experiments, we demonstrate that approximately 20 different lipids can be automatically and unambiguously assigned and quantified by this automatic method.