Fatty acid profiling of phospholipids by field desorption and fast atom bombardment mass spectrometry.

Natural phosphatidylcholines, phosphatidylethanolamines and sphingomyelins have been investigated by field desorption and fast atom bombardment mass spectrometry. It is demonstrated that using these soft mass spectrometric ionization techniques, accurate, fast, and sensitive fatty acid profiling of phospholipids can be performed. With respect to the analysis of intact molecular species both ionization techniques reveal similar results. Using field desorption, a specific fragment ion provides a fast access to the total distribution of fatty acids in complex lipids. Generally, a good agreement between the mass spectrometric abundance data and those produced by gas chromatographic analysis is observed.