Locating Carbon–Carbon Double Bonds in Unsaturated Phospholipids by Epoxidation Reaction and Tandem Mass Spectrometry

The presence of carbon–carbon double bonds (CCs) in unsaturated phospholipids is closely related to lipid conformations and physiochemical activities. Previously, we have demonstrated that epoxidation reaction facilitated by low-temperature plasma (LTP) enabled the structural analysis of unsaturated fatty acids (FAs). Epoxidation of the CC leads to the production of an epoxide, which can be easily cleaved via collision-induced dissociation (CID) to produce diagnostic ions indicative of the CC bond locations in FAs. In this work, we further developed this method for analysis of phospholipids. Tandem mass spectrometry analysis with epoxidation reaction was performed in both positive and negative ion mode to analyze phosphatidylcholines (PCs), phosphatidic acids (PAs), phosphatidylethanolamines (PEs), phosphatidylglycerols (PGs), and phosphatidylinositols (PIs). The developed method was applied in a shotgun lipidomics approach to characterize phospholipids in a bovine liver extract.