Sampling, Storage, and Related Concerns

In the lipidomics era, how to collect a sample for lipid analysis is one of the important issues to be considered. Unlike the old-fashioned lipid extraction where a large portion or the entire organ is needed, with current highly sensitive analysis methods, only a very small amount of source material is needed to prepare a sample for analysis. It would be a big waste if the entire available sample (e.g., an organ) or a large part of it would still be used for lipid extraction as the old manner. When taking a small amount of samples from the source material, two points should be kept in mind. First, the small amount of samples taken must be representative to the entire source material. Second, enough materials, but not too much, should be sampled for all of the planned analyses. 

In general, larger amounts ( 10-fold) of material are necessary when employing any LC-MS-based method to achieve a similar coverage of lipid classes to MDMS-SL [7]. However, the necessary sample size with an LC-MS method for a targeted lipid 

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