Fig. 1: Nanoflow lipidomics with trapped ion mobility spectrometry.
From: Trapped ion mobility spectrometry and PASEF enable in-depth lipidomics from minimal sample amounts
a Lipids from various biological sources, such as body fluids, tissues and cells, are analyzed using a single MeOH:MTBE extraction. b The crude extract is injected into a nanoflow liquid chromatography (LC) system coupled online to a high-resolution TIMS quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer (timsTOF Pro). In the dual TIMS analyzer, ions are accumulated in the front part (TIMS 1), while another batch is released as a function of ion mobility from the TIMS 2 analyzer. PASEF synchronizes precursor selection and ion mobility separation, which allows fragmenting multiple precursors in a single TIMS scan at full sensitivity. c Features are extracted from the four-dimensional (retention time, m/z, ion mobility, intensity) data space and assigned to PASEF MS/MS spectra for automated lipid identification and compilation of comprehensive lipid CCS libraries. MeOH = methanol, MTBE = methyl-tert-butyl ether, CCS = collisional cross section.
