Phospholipid characterization by a TQ-MS data based identification scheme

Phospholipids play a wide variety of roles such as the structural units of the cellular membrane, the storage and transport of lipids, the precursor of the lipid mediators and the energy source in vivo. To deeply understand the biological function of phospholipids, quantitative analysis for the phospholipid composition ratio in the blood and tissues is required. Phospholipids species have many types of combination of its characteristic head groups and fatty acid composition. Although identifiation of phospholipid species typically is performed for the data acquired by a high resolution mass spectrometer, in this study, we report phospholipids database search and quantitative analysis by coupling LC-TQ MS with SimLipid software.