Lipids are involved in many biological processes and their study is constantly increasing. To identify a lipid among thousand requires of reliable methods and techniques. Ion Mobility (IM) can be coupled with Mass Spectrometry (MS) to increase analytical selectivity in lipid analysis of lipids. IM-MS has experienced an enormous development in several aspects, including instrumentation, sensitivity, amount of information collected and lipid identification capabilities. This review summarizes the latest developments in IM-MS analyses for lipidomics and focuses on the current acquisition modes in IM-MS, the approaches for the pre-treatment of the acquired data and the subsequent data analysis. Methods and tools for the calculation of Collision Cross Section (CCS) values of analytes are also reviewed. CCS values are commonly studied to support the identification of lipids, providing a quasi-orthogonal property that increases the confidence level in the annotation of compounds and can be matched in CCS databases. The information contained in this review might be of help to new users of IM-MS to decide the adequate instrumentation and software to perform IM-MS experiments for lipid analyses, but also for other experienced researchers that can reconsider their routines and protocols.
Keywords: acquisition; data; databases; ion mobility; lipidomics; mass spectrometry.
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