Industry-first Glycolipid-Specific Library

Shimadzu has released the industry-first glycolipid-specific library, containing information on 256 types of glycolipids. The library is a result of joint research with Dr Akemi Suzuki, Director of the Institute of Glycoscience at Tokai University, Japan. Even users without specialised expertise can now prepare samples, specify analytical conditions, analyse data and identify glycolipids using an LCMS-IT-TOF liquid chromatograph mass spectrometer.

Glycolipids have gained considerable attention in recent years. However, glycolipids have complicated structures containing both sugar chain and lipid structures. This requires a high level of knowledge and expertise for pretreatment, setting of analytical conditions and so on. As a result, there has been a high barrier to entry for researching of glycolipids.

The glycolipid library, developed jointly by Shimadzu and Dr Suzuki, includes glycolipid extraction methods, analytical conditions, a library for identifying glycolipids and other information so that even researchers who have never analysed glycolipids before can quickly analyse glycolipids with high precision. The library contains mass spectra for a total of 256 types of glycolipids, including 21 ceramides, 193 acidic glycolipids and 42 neutral glycolipids, all of which were acquired from real measurements. By using these extraction methods, measurement parameters and other instructions specified in the instruction manual, researchers can now analyse and identify glycolipids based on the library.

The LCMS-IT-TOF system applied for analysis captures specific ions using an ion trap (IT) mechanism and splits them into fragments. It then measures the masses of the fragments accurately based on the difference in length of time taken for the fragments to reach the detector (TOF-MS). By repeatedly trapping specific ions and measuring fragment masses, it is able to predict the structure of compounds with high precision. The library even includes MS3 spectra which can be used to identify ceramides structures, which is not possible with MS/MS spectra. Using this library makes it possible to analyse the entire glycolipid structure easily and precisely, not just the sugar chain portion but also the lipid portion, which was previously difficult to accomplish.