Lipid Extraction from Yeast Cells

The diversity of lipid molecules in biological tissues makes their analysis an experimental challenge. Not only do lipids differ greatly in their chemical structures and biophysical properties, but they also occur in greatly varying concentrations in living cells. Accordingly, even for an organism with a relatively simple lipidome such as yeast, multiple extraction and analysis protocols have been developed because none of them allows comprehensive and quantitative determination of all the diverse molecular lipid species. Here we describe an extraction procedure that results in good yields of neutral lipids and glycerophospholipids from yeast. The resulting samples are suitable for analysis by thin-layer chromatography, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, or high-performance liquid chromatography.