Profiling of phospholipids and related lipid structures using multidimensional ion mobility spectrometry-mass spectrometry

Increasingly comprehensive questions related to the biosynthesis of lipids relevant to understanding new signaling pathways have created daunting tasks for their chemical analysis. Here, ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) and mass spectrometry (MS) techniques combined with electrospray ionization have been used to examine mixtures of closely related lipid structures. The drift time distributions of sphingomyelins show baseline separations for ethylene chain length differences (Δ ∼ 1.2 ms) and partial separations in single unsaturation differences (Δ ∼ 0.3 ms) revealing that the most compact structures are observed with shorter chains and increasing unsaturation. Drift time distributions of different ionizations frequently fall into families with the same drift times (isodrifts) indicating that the ion attached to the lipid has little structural influence. The present data show that phospholipids, especially phosphatidylinositol, aggregate to form inverted micelles. Phospholipids (phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylethanolamine, sphingomyelin, and phosphatidylinositol) are effectively separated according to their polar head groups. This method also provides information about the mixture composition of the chemically different lipids N-palmitoyl glycine, N-arachidonoyl ethanolamide, and phosphatidylcholine existing over an array of charge states and sizes (inverted micelles) depending on mixture concentration. Multidimensional IMS3-MS introduces an additional dimension to fragmentation analysis by separating the fragmented ions into groups related to size, shape and charge and allows determination of sn-1 and sn-2 substitution as is shown for phosphatidylglycerols. This contribution provides evidence for extending the targeted approach to global lipidomics analysis using the high-efficiency gas-phase separation afforded by multidimensional IMS-MS.