You have full access to this open access article. Cerebrospinal fluid CSF is a metabolically diverse biofluid and a key specimen for exploring biochemical changes in neurodegenerative diseases.
Detecting lipid species in CSF using mass spectrometry MS -based techniques remains challenging because lipids are highly complex in structure, and their concentrations span over a broad dynamic range. This work aimed to develop a robust lipidomics and metabolomics method based on commonly used two-phase extraction systems from human CSF samples. CSF is a clear aqueous fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord and fills the ventricular system of the central nervous system CNS.
The CSF serves as a medium for delivering nutrients to neuronal cells, distributing neurotransmitters throughout the CNS, and acts as a lymphatic system to eliminate waste products of cellular metabolism [ 1 ].
Due to the direct contact with the brain, CSF is regarded as an important diagnostic tool for identifying novel biomarkers for the diagnosis or prognosis of neurodegenerative diseases [ 2 ]. Lipids are important structural components of cell membranes, serving as energy storage, and play essential roles in controlling and regulating cellular and neuronal functions associated with human physical and pathological conditions [ 3 ]. Lipids exhibit remarkable structural diversity characterized by acyl chain lengths, degree of saturation, and a variable head group linked to the phosphate group in glycerophospholipids [ 4 , 5 , 6 ].
The diversity of lipids is essential to their cellular functions [ 6 ]. Lipidomics aims to analyze, comprehensively and quantitatively, wide arrays of lipids in biological samples [ 6 ]. Among the techniques for screening brain-related biomolecules in CSF, lipidomics is receiving increasing attention due to the importance of lipids in brain molecular signaling and their association with several neurological diseases [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ].
