Quality control requirements for the correct annotation of lipidomics data

Abstract

Automated lipid species annotation based on fragment ion mass spectra faces three major challenges; isobaric or isomeric lipid species from different classes often yield similar fragments and cannot be unambigiously matched; the abundance of lipid fragments strongly depends on the experimental conditions which compromises their similarity to reference spectra; fragmentation of co-isolated precursors often originating from different classes yields highly convoluted spectra.