In-depth lipidomic analysis of tri-, di-, and mono-acylglycerols released from milk fat after in vitro digestion

Milk fat is arguably one of the most complex fats found in nature and varies widely between animal species. Analysis of its digestion products is tremendously challenging, due to the complexity, diversity, and large range of concentrations of triacylglycerols (TAGs) and their digestion products (i.e. diacylglycerols (DAGs), monoacylglycerols (MAGs), and free fatty acids (FFAs)). Therefore, a method combined the solid phase extraction (SPE), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and multi-dimension mass spectrometry (MDMS) was developed to identify and semi-quantify the TAGs, DAGs and MAGs in milk fat after in vitro digestion. Up to 105, 64, 14 and 30 species of TAGs, DAGs, MAGs, and FFAs were determined with their concentrations of 0.01–22.3, 0.01–39.2, 0.01–47.8, and 0.04–191.0 mg/g fat, respectively, during the in vitro digestion of cow and sheep milk. The validation of the method shows that this method was precise and reliable.