Lipid map of the mammalian cell

Technological developments, especially in mass spectrometry and bioinformatics, have revealed that living cells contain thousands rather than dozens of different lipids [for classification and nomenclature, see Fahy et al. (Fahy et al., 2009)]. Now, the resulting questions are what is the relevance of each of these unique molecules for the cell and how do cells use lipids for their vital functions? The answer requires an integrative approach – cellular lipidomics – which addresses first the distribution of all lipids between the various organelle membranes and then their local organization within each membrane. To understand lipid homeostasis and its dynamics, one has to study the localized metabolism of…