LipidLynxX Conversion of Complex Lipids

[Mudjgiwa]

I am new in the field of lipidomics, and I have been using your LipidLynxX tool for lipid nomenclature conversion. While I find the tool very useful, I have encountered an issue that I hope you can assist me with. I am working with complex lipids, specifically triacylglycerols (TAGs), and I've noticed that the conversion process is resulting in a loss of important structural information. For example: TAG 54:2+NH4 (FA 18:1+C3H6O) and TAG 54:2+NH4 (FA 18:0+C3H6O) are both being converted to simply TG 54:2. This conversion loses the crucial information about the specific fatty acid compositions, which is vital for my research. I would greatly appreciate your guidance on how to preserve this level of structural detail during the conversion process. Specifically: 1. Are there any settings or options in LipidLynxX that I might be overlooking that would allow for the preservation of fatty acid information? 2. If not, do you have plans to implement such a feature in future versions of the tool? 3. Can you recommend any workarounds or alternative approaches to maintain this level of detail while still benefiting from the standardization that LipidLynxX provides? Thank you for your time and for developing this valuable tool for the lipidomics community. I look forward to your response and any insights you can provide.

Regards,
Patience

[ZhixuNi]

Hi!
Thank you for the nice feedback!

If I understood correctly, you want to keep some FA residues information of the TG with some rest part which still not yet confident to annotate. This is nice way to avoid over reporting of the data.
However, currently there is no standard shorthand lipid abbreviations for this level of information/annotation. So There is no reference way to perform the conversion.
I'm in the phase of LipidLynxX 2 which might be able to implement a way to contain the FA residues information. This is still depending on the actual development progress.
Currently, you still need to add this information manually back to the final table. I also do not have a better solution at the current state of the situations.

Wish you all the best for your data analysis project!