Stable Isotope Labeled Standards

With the availability of stable isotope standards and the incorporation of soft ionization techniques in mass spectrometry the detection of very small amounts of sphingolipids can be accomplished. The two major approaches of sphingolipidomic studies are the liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry based methods and the shotgun lipidomics approach. These techniques require the use of internal standards for each class of sphingolipid expected to be found in a sample.