Lipids are fundamental for our existence, coming in shapes of being both good and bad. However, we are still only scratching the surface in lipid science, leaving many open questions to the background of the high lipid diversity and to the functions and roles of the individual lipids. Mass spectrometry-based lipid analysis is aimed to disentangle this complexity. Over the last 20 years lipidomics has revolutionized lipid research and led to a substantial growth in lipidomics efforts and data. However, this expansion has also led to confusion and uncertainty observed in numerous studies reporting poor lipidomics data quality due to misidentification and inaccurate quantification. We launched the Lipidomics Standards Initiative (LSI; https://lipidomics-standards-initiative.org/) in spring 2018 to address these challenges. Calling for the lipidomics community to work closer together towards standardization and harmonization and bringing lipidomics beyond current boarders, we established the International Lipidomics Society (ILS; https://lipidomicssociety.org) in 2019. As a result, we have developed community-based guidelines and minimum requirements for generating, reporting, and publishing lipidomic data. The Lipidomics Minimal Reporting Checklist has been established as a web-based questionnaire (https://lipidomicstandards.org/reporting_checklist/) to describe all essential steps of lipidomic experiments in a standardized way. These consensus guidelines foster data quality and provides a language for data comparison/exchange and advance lipidomics to a genuine analytical tool from basic research to clinical applications. In parallel, we have initiated several Interest Groups (https://lipidomicssociety.org/working-groups/) to actively harmonize and develop the field as a community with a close crosstalk to the diverse lipid scientific fields.
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