Circadian Lipidomics: Analysis of Lipid Metabolites Around the Clock.

Lipidomics has been defined as the large-scale analysis of lipids in organelles, cells, tissues, or whole organisms. Including the temporal aspects of lipid metabolic changes into this analysis allows to access yet another important aspect of lipid regulation. The resulting methodology, circadian lipidomics, has thus emerged as a novel tool to address the enormous complexity, which is present among cellular lipids. Here, we describe how mass spectrometry-based circadian lipidomics can be applied to study the impact of peripheral clocks on lipid metabolism in human primary cells and tissues, exemplified by studies in human pancreatic islets and skeletal myotubes.