Determination of acylglycerols from biological samples with chromatography‐based methods

Abstract

Lipids are the most diverse class of metabolites in mammalian physiology and dysregulation of lipid metabolism is linked to various diseases. Alterations in acylglycerols, a major class of lipids in plasma and adipose tissue, are involved in the pathogenesis of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Therefore, determination of acylglycerols is important to depict and unravel cellular mechanisms related to pathological outcomes, and specific molecular species of acylglycerols might be promising biomarker candidates. The variety of acylglycerols can be characterized in different ways. Enzymatic assays enable the determination of total tri- or diacylglycerols showing a possible relation to diseases, but they do not allow clarification of molecular mechanism. While gas chromatography can provide an overview of the fatty acid composition of total or separated lipids, a very detailed description of the individual molecular acylglycerol species is possible via liquid chromatography, particularly when combined with mass spectrometry. This review describes the determination of acylglycerols considering recent developments, with a focus on mammalian serum/plasma and tissue.

Metabolomic Biomarkers for Obesity in Humans: A Short Review

“…Thus, two different assumptions can be made. First, the absolute FA concentration in the blood is increased in obese subjects (this is in accordance with elevated triacylglycerol levels) [33] , and second, and maybe more importantly, the composition of FA in the blood changes. Elevated percentages of monounsaturated FA (MUFA) reflect an increase in stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD) activity [35] , and this means a higher rate of conversion from saturated FA to MUFA.…”

“…Lipids, another class of metabolites associated with obesity in some publications, can be determined as a molecular species or through the FA composition of single lipid classes such as glycerophopholipids [30,31] , NEFA [32] , and acylglycerols [33] , as well as that of all lipid classes (total FA; tFA) [34] . Thus, comparison of the results of different reports is challenging.…”

Quantitative Analysis of TAG in Oils Using Lithium Cationization and Direct‐Infusion ESI Tandem Mass Spectrometry

“…At present, exhaustive analysis of the components in oils is usually accomplished using some form of chromatography as a separation technique coupled to mass spectrometry to provide additional separation and specific identification of TAG components [1][2][3][4][5]. Including chromatography in the analysis protocol provides a separation step which can reduce analyte overlap, noise, and ion suppression effects.…”

Regulation of Early Human Growth: Impact on Long-Term Health

“…This approach has now become feasible with established high-throughput, precise analytical tools for targeted metabolomic profiling from minimal sample volumes using flow injection analysis with triple-quad mass spectrometry, which is extremely powerful [43,44,45,46,47,48,49]. Application of these sophisticated tools bears the very promising potential to detect relevant but as yet unidentified regulatory substrates involved in the modulation of growth and body composition.…”