Abstract
Recent technical improvement and technological innovation in small molecule mass spectrometry have provided powerful tools for the intensive metabolomic biochemical investigations that will necessarily characterise the ”post-genomic“ era of biomedical research. For membrane phospholipids, use of tandem electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry (ESI-MS/MS) exploiting precursor scanning of class-specific diagnostic fragments, can provide detailed quantitative profiles at the level of individual molecular species for many hundreds of unique lipids. Such ”snapshot“ measurements provide little information concerning metabolic flux. However, recent use of metabolic labelling with stable isotope derivatives of phospholipid headgroups combined with precursor scans of unlabelled and labelled fragments have yielded considerable insight into phosphatidylcholine metabolism in vivo. Here, we briefly review some of the recent work on pathways of phosphatidylcholine metabolism ranging from studies at subcellular organelle level through to whole organism. The sensitivity, specificity and suitability of this powerful methodological approach to numerous questions of phospholipid metabolism place ESI-MS/MS at the very heart of dynamic lipidomics in the foreseeable future.