Identification of Double Bond Position Isomers in Unsaturated Lipids by m-CPBA Epoxidation and Mass Spectrometry Fragmentation

Lipids are highly diverse biomolecules associated with several biological functions including structural constituent, energy storage, and signal transduction. It is essential to characterize lipid structural isomers and further understand their biological roles. Unsaturated lipids contain one or multiple carbon carbon double bonds. Identifying double bond position presents a major challenge in unsaturated lipid characterization. Recently, several advancements have been made for double bond localization by mass spectrometry (MS) analysis. However, many of these studies require complex chemical reactions or advanced mass spectrometers with special fragmentation techniques, which limits the application in lipidomics study. Here, an innovative meta-chloroperoxybenzoic acid (m-CPBA) epoxidation reaction coupling with collision-induced dissociation (CID)-MS/MS strategy provides a new tool for unsaturated lipidomics analysis. The rapid epoxidation reaction was carried out by m-CPBA with high specificity. Complete derivatization was achieved in minutes without overoxidized byproduct. Moreover, diagnostic ion pair with 16 Da mass difference indicated localization of carbon-carbon double bond in MS/MS spectra. Multiple lipid classes were evaluated with this strategy and generated abundant fragments for structural analysis. Unsaturated lipid analysis of yeast extract using this strategy took less than 30 min, demonstrating the potential for high-throughput lipidomics analysis by this approach. This study opens a door for high throughput unsaturated lipid analysis with minimal requirement for instrumentation, which could be widely applied in lipidomics analysis.