Development of a TLC-based method for simple screening of lipids by MALDI imaging

Lipids share diverse biological functions and locations in the body while being structurally vast class of compounds. They detection and quantification are therefore an analytical challenge. In this work, we developed a new method for non-targeted detection and relative quantification of lipids profiling using radial separation on thin layer chromatography plate (TLC) coupled with MALDI MSI detection. MALDI suffers from ion suppression effects that lower the dynamic range of observable lipids from complex mixtures. A fast pre-separation of lipid families on the MALDI-TLC support limits this drawback while adding an additional identification parameter: the retention factor. The limitations of the mass resolving power in MALDI imaging have been studied in order to define the optimal instrumental and sample preparation conditions. Data processing required a fast lipid identification tool, Kendrick Mass Defects filtering was used for fast and non-targeted data analysis.