Lipidomics refers to the systematic approach to study all lipids and their interacting partners in a biological system. The mass spectrometry of crude lipid extracts from a biological tissue can generate a fingerprint of the biological sample. Thus, subtle changes in the lipid composition can be detected.

Lipidomics is that the large-scale study of pathways and networks of cellular lipids in biological systems. The word "lipidome" is employed to explain the entire lipid profile within a cell, tissue, organism, or ecosystem and may be a subset of the "metabolome" which also includes the three other major classes of biological molecules: proteins/amino-acids, sugars and nucleic acids. Lipidomics may be a relatively recent research field that has been driven by rapid advances in technologies like mass spectrometry (MS), nuclear resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, dual polarisation interferometry and computational methods, including the popularity of the role of lipids in many metabolic diseases like obesity, atherosclerosis, stroke, hypertension and diabetes. This rapidly expanding field. Complements the large progress made in genomics and proteomics, all of which constitute the family of systems biology.