LipidXplorer
Identifies lipids in shotgun MS and MS/MS data with your own MFQL queries.
- Desktop app
- Windows
- macOS (ARM)
- Linux
- v1.5.0 · 3 Sep 2026
User Survey:
In order to improve our services, please provide your feedback in our LipidXplorer Survey.
LipidXplorer is a software that supports a variety of untargeted shotgun lipidomics experiments and experiments from LC/MS lipidomics. It is designed to support bottom-up and top-down shotgun lipidomics experiments performed on all types of tandem mass spectrometers. Lipid identification does not rely on a database resource of reference or simulated mass spectra.
Please check the release history below for the latest available version of LipidXplorer.
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The current documentation is available in the LipidXplorer Wiki.
Contact and Help Desk
Please use the support contact form.
Latest release
Latest Release: LipidXplorer 1.5
25 August 2026August 25, 2026
Citing LipidXplorer
If you use this software release in your own work, please cite it with the following DOI:
Please reference LipidXplorer in general by citing the following publications:
Herzog R, Schuhmann K, Schwudke D, Sampaio JL, Bornstein SR, Schroeder M, et al. (2012) LipidXplorer: A Software for Consensual Cross-Platform Lipidomics. PLoS ONE 7(1): e29851. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029851
Herzog R, Schwudke D, Schuhmann K, Sampaio JL, Bornstein SR, Schroeder M, Shevchenko A (2011) A novel informatics concept for high-throughput shotgun lipidomics based on the molecular fragmentation query language. Genome Biol. 2011;12(1):R8. https://doi.org/10.1186/gb-2011-12-1-r8
Additionally, if you are using a particular version of LipidXplorer, from version 1.2.8 onwards, each release has a citable DOI for LipidXplorer@Zenodo.
Aims:
For keeping LipidXplorer maintainable and utilize updated programming features as well as libraries the code base was upgraded from Python 2 to Python 3. Official support for Python 2 is no longer available. This version is also meant as bridging element between our legacy workflow for shotgun lipidomics (LipidXplorer 1.5 –> lxPostman) and LipidXplorerNext. We further included features that are aimed to improve user guidance as well as overall performance of Lipidxplorer.
Download:
v1.5 for Windows v1.5 for Linux v1.5 for Mac (ARM) v1.5 benchmark data
Installation instructions and Tutorials for LipidXplorer are available here.
Benchmark Data
The samples originated from mice lung tissue. The data consists of data in *.raw and *.mzML format (5 mins positive, 5 mins negative), a batch script to convert data from raw to mzML format using MSConvert, a settings (*.ini) file for LipidXplorer settings, and a standardized MFQLs for both positive and negative ion mode.
