Neurolipidomics: challenges and developments

The field of lipidomics is one of the most rapidly expanding areas of systems biology research. Considering the uniqueness and complexity of the lipidome in the nervous system (i.e., neurolipidome), neurolipidomics remains quite challenging but exciting. With the recent development of mass spectrometry (MS)-based lipidomics, particularly the rapid improvement of multi-dimensional MS-based shotgun lipidomics, much progress has been made in neurolipidomics. As the accelerated development of future technologies enables lipidomics penetrance into lower and lower abundance regions of mass contents of individual lipid molecular species, it can be anticipated that many biochemical mechanisms underlying lipid metabolism critical to neuronal disease states will be increasingly uncovered. Through exploiting the information content inherent in the complexity of neuronal lipid composition and kinetic turnover which can be revealed by neurolipidomics, substantial insights into neuronal plasticity and gene function can be gathered. Through neurolipidomics, the markers for these neuronal diseases which identify pathological alterations and are diagnostic of disease onset, progression or severity may potentially be discovered. Accordingly, with neurolipidomics, our understanding of the complexities of the nervous system will be undoubtedly accelerated, as many mysteries are resolved.