Mass Spectrometry-Based Shotgun Lipidomics for Cancer Research

Shotgun lipidomics is an analytical approach for large-scale and systematic analysis of the composition, structure, and quantity of cellular lipids directly from lipid extracts of biological samples by mass spectrometry. This approach possesses advantages of high throughput and quantitative accuracy, especially in absolute quantification. As cancer research deepens at the level of quantitative biology and metabolomics, the demand for lipidomics approaches such as shotgun lipidomics is becoming greater. In this chapter, the principles, approaches, and some applications of shotgun lipidomics for cancer research are overviewed.