Targeted Lipidomics of Mycobacterial Lipids and Glycolipids

Decades of study have highlighted the richness and uniqueness of the repertoire of lipid and glycolipid families produced by mycobacteria. Many of these families potently regulate host immune responses, in stimulatory or suppressive ways. Thus, the global study of this repertoire in different genetic backgrounds or under model conditions of infection is gaining interest. Despite the difficulties associated with the specificities of this repertoire, the field of mass spectrometry-based lipidomics of mycobacteria has recently made considerable progress, particularly at the analytical level. There is still considerable scope for further progress, especially with regard to the development of an efficient bioinfomatics pipeline for the analysis of the large datasets generated. This chapter describes an HPLC-MS methodology allowing the simultaneous screening of more than 20 of the lipid families produced by mycobacteria and provides recommendations to analyze the generated data given the state-of-the-art.