Skip to content
BY-NC-ND 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter April 20, 2017

Computational Lipidomics and Lipid Bioinformatics: Filling In the Blanks

  • Josch K. Pauling EMAIL logo and Edda Klipp

Summary

Lipids are highly diverse metabolites of pronounced importance in health and disease. While metabolomics is a broad field under the omics umbrella that may also relate to lipids, lipidomics is an emerging field which specializes in the identification, quantification and functional interpretation of complex lipidomes. Today, it is possible to identify and distinguish lipids in a high-resolution, high-throughput manner and simultaneously with a lot of structural detail. However, doing so may produce thousands of mass spectra in a single experiment which has created a high demand for specialized computational support to analyze these spectral libraries. The computational biology and bioinformatics community has so far established methodology in genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics but there are many (combinatorial) challenges when it comes to structural diversity of lipids and their identification, quantification and interpretation. This review gives an overview and outlook on lipidomics research and illustrates ongoing computational and bioinformatics efforts. These efforts are important and necessary steps to advance the lipidomics field alongside analytic, biochemistry, biomedical and biology communities and to close the gap in available computational methodology between lipidomics and other omics sub-branches.

Published Online: 2017-4-20
Published in Print: 2016-3-1

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Downloaded on 6.12.2023 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jib-2016-299/html
Scroll to top button