Development and application of chromatographic methods for glycerolipid analysis

In the past 30 years, chiral-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has progressed from an application practiced by just a few chromatographers to a popular method widely used in many areas of pharmaceutical and biological sciences, including lipid chemistry. Since we demonstrated HPLC resolution of mono- and diacylglycerol enantiomers on chiral stationary phases in the 1980s, the methodology has been extended to the resolution of various synthetic and naturally occurring chiral glycerolipids. Using reversed-phase HPLC, we also demonstrated the successful resolution of 1,2-diacylglycerol regioisomers (reverse isomers), which had remained a major unsolved problem in glycerolipid chromatography. These developments of the methodology permit further expansion of lipidomics and better understanding of lipid metabolism.