Lipidonly

Lipidonly is a term used across biochemistry, nutrition, and computational biology to describe systems, samples, or models that focus on lipids to the exclusion of other biomolecules.

In analytical chemistry, a lipid-only approach refers to isolating and analyzing lipid species from a biological sample while removing proteins, carbohydrates, and polar metabolites. In lipidomics, this often uses lipid extraction methods (for example, Bligh-Dyer or Folch) followed by mass spectrometry or chromatography. The phrase is used to indicate the dataset or analysis targets lipid species such as glycerolipids, phospholipids, sphingolipids, and sterol lipids. Variants of the term are field-specific.

In nutrition and physiology, a lipid-only diet or formulation is an experimental condition in which fats provide all dietary energy, with little or no carbohydrate or protein. Such regimes are typically used in controlled studies to probe lipid metabolism, energy balance, or ketosis, but are not nutritionally complete for long-term human use.

In systems biology or metabolic modeling, lipid-only networks model lipid metabolism pathways in isolation to simplify analysis or to study specific questions about lipid fluxes, enzyme regulation, or disease states.

See also lipidomics, lipid metabolism, fatty acids, metabolic network.