Advancing Lipidomic Bioinformatic Technologies: Visualization and Phospholipid Identification (VaLID) version 3.0

There is a paucity of bioinformatic tools for spectral analysis capable of assigning and visualizing molecular identities from mass spectrometryderived structural information. Predicting phospholipid lipid identities is a labour-intensive process given the extreme variability in structure based on permutations of only a few atomic ‘building blocks’. Moreover, our ability to visualize all theoretically possible phospholipids present in lipidomic datasets is limited. To address this gap, we created the online lipidomic bioinformatic tool Visualization and Phospholipid Identification (VaLID). This work describes the expansion of this tool to include functional search capacity linking the VaLID 3.0 database of 1,324,224 theoretically possible phospholipids to PubMed and the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB) as well as the inclusion of lipid predictions using nomenclatures now useful for researchers employing a shotgun lipidomic approach. VaLID is freely available at http://neurolipidomics.com/resources.html.