Mass spectrometry-based lipidomics as a powerful platform in foodomics research

Background: As an emerging and rapidly growing omics field derived from metabolomics, lipidomics focuses on comprehensive analysis of lipid molecules in biological matrices. In recent years, the rapid development of lipidomics approaches using mass spectrometry (MS) has shown great potential in food lipids analysis and dietary lipid nutrition research within foodomics, which brings different strategies that manage to face the complex challenges existed in global food chains and provides comprehensive insights into lipid nutrition and health. Scope and approach: This review presents a profile of MS-based lipidomics, from sample preparation to data processing. Analytical strategies, MS-based platforms and chemometric tools that are widely employed in lipidomics researches are summarized. The feasibility of MS-based lipidomics approaches in the field of foodomics has been demonstrated with their recent applications in food traceability, quality, safety, as well as revealing the health benefits of dietary lipids. Key findings and conclusions: MS-based lipidomics analysis in foodomics discipline can provide compositional and structural information about lipid components in a food matrix or alteration of lipid metabolism in organisms after diet intervention. When combined with chemometric tools, this powerful platform enables sensitive and robust detection of food fraud, assessment of food safety problems concerning lipid molecules and in-depth investigation of the functional roles of dietary lipids. The advances of MS and progresses in separation techniques will further expand the application of MS-based lipidomics in foodomics research, and thus offering us more new knowledge of food lipids.