[WHITE PAPER] Best practices for sample preparation & lipid extraction from various samples

Lipids play a structural role in organisms, forming cells and organelles’ membranes. Not only do they store energy, but recent studies also showed their role as first and second messengers in signal transduction. As they are implicated in widespread pathologies such as cancer or inflammation, they have become a major concern for the scientific community.

Lipid extraction for analysis can be challenging due to their structure and composition, in various biological materials. Different kinds of lipids, such as complex organic compounds, fats, oils, waxes and even hormones exist in living cell membranes. Although there are numerous methods of lipid extraction available to date, a vast majority of them starts with cell or tissue homogenization. Bead beating has been reported to be one of the most effective and rapid cell & tissue disruption method, increasing lipid extraction efficiency at a lower cost (Kumar et al., 2015).

Here, we present three case studies highlighting the usefulness of the Precellys® homogenizer combined with the Cryolys® cooling unit for sample preparation prior to lipid extraction.