LipSpin: a new bioinformatics tool for quantitative ¹H NMR lipid profiling

The structural similarity among lipid species and the low sensitivity and spectral resolution of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) have traditionally hampered the routine use of ¹H NMR lipid profiling of complex biological samples in metabolomics, which remains mostly manual and lacks freely available bioinformatics tools. However, ¹H NMR lipid profiling provides fast quantitative screening of major lipid classes (fatty acids, glycerolipids, phospholipids, and sterols) and some individual species and has been used in several clinical and nutritional studies, leading to improved risk prediction models. In this Article, we present LipSpin, a free and open-source bioinformatics tool for quantitative ¹H NMR lipid profiling. LipSpin implements a constrained line shape fitting algorithm based on voigt profiles and spectral templates from spectra of lipid standards, which automates the analysis of severely overlapped spectral regions and lipid signals with complex coupling patterns. LipSpin provides the most detailed quantification of fatty acid families and choline phospholipids in serum lipid samples by ¹H NMR to date. Moreover, analytical and clinical results using LipSpin quantifications conform with other techniques commonly used for lipid analysis.