The emerging role of ion mobility-mass spectrometry in lipidomics to facilitate lipid separation and identification

Abstract Lipids represent an important class of biomolecules, and play numerous roles in physiological and pathological processes and activates. The enormous chemical and compositional diversity of lipids presents a significant challenge for lipidomics. The emerging technology of ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) has provided an orthogonal separation to effectively improve resolving power and selectivity in lipid analysis. Meanwhile, IM-MS has also provided a valuable physiochemical property, namely, collision cross section (CCS), to facilitate lipid identification. In this review, we introduced the use of IM-MS technology to separate different lipid species and isomers. Then, we highlighted the applications of IM-MS for lipid structural identification in lipidomics. Finally, we discussed the potentials of IM-MS for the measurement and annotation of novel lipid species in biological samples.