A plasma lipidomics strategy reveals perturbed lipid metabolic pathways and potential lipid biomarkers of human colorectal cancer

To explore underlying molecular mechanisms and identify novel lipid biomarkers promising for colorectal cancer (CRC) diagnosis, a continuous-flow two dimensional liquid chromatography–quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (2D LC-QToF/MS) method was employed to comprehensively measure lipid species in human plasma of CRC patients and healthy controls. With a total of 427 annotated lipid species, we identified 64 lipid species with corrected p value less than 0.05 and fold change more than 1.5. These significantly altered lipid species were mainly involved in glycerolipids and glycerophospholipids metabolism and sphingolipids metabolism. After the diagnosis ability evaluation based on the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, phosphatidylglycerol (34:0), sphingomyelin (42:2), ceramide (44:5), lysophosphatidylcholine (18:3), lysophosphatidylcholine (18:2), phosphatidylethanolamine (O-36:3), phosphatidylethanolamine (O-38:3) and sphingomyelin (38:8) were finally proposed as the potential biomarkers with the area under the curve (AUC) more than 0.900. These results suggest that this 2D LC-QToF/MS-based lipidomics profiling has great potential as a noninvasive diagnostic method in detecting CRC and hopefully provide new clues to understand its underlying mechanism.