A high throughput lipidomics method and its application in atrial fibrillation based on 96-well plate pretreatment and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry

Successful applications of lipidomics in clinic need study large-scale samples, and the bottlenecks are in throughput and robustness of the lipid analytical method. Here, we report an untargeted lipidomics method by combining high throughput pretreatment in the 96-well plate with ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled to quadrupole time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometry. The developed method was validated to have satisfactory analytical characteristics in terms of linearity, repeatability and extraction recovery. It can be used to handle 96 samples simultaneously in 25 min and detect 441 lipids in plasma sample. Storage stability investigation on lipid extracts provided an operable procedure for large-scale sample analysis and demonstrated most lipids were stable in autosampler at 10 °C within 36 h and at -80 °C within 72 h after the pretreatment. To prove the usefulness, the method was employed to investigate abnormal plasma lipidome related to atrial fibrillation. A biomarker panel with the area under the curve (AUC) values of 0.831 and 0.745 was achieved in the discovery and external validation sets, respectively. These results showed that the developed method is applicable for large-scale biological sample handling and lipid analysis of plasma.