Lipidomics in Children: Noninvasive Sebum Sampling in Children and Adults Allows for Assessment of Lipidomic Differences According to Age, Sex, and Biological Relatedness

Sampling lipids from the skin surface via noninvasive sebum collection is painless, efficient, and has already demonstrated clinical potential in preliminary biomarker research. Replacing blood-based sampling with sebum sampling will allow these benefits to be leveraged as well as enable researchers to better include protected populations, such as children, who tend to be excluded from biomarker research. However, for researchers to obtain meaningful lipidomic data sets in routine studies, more information is needed regarding sebum sampling feasibility and variability. Herein, we assess the feasibility of forehead sebum sampling from child participants. Furthermore, using high resolution mass spectrometry in combination with both supervised and unsupervised classification, we determine the variability of the lipid profile according to the age, sex, and biological relatedness of 98 participants, ages four to 73. Outcomes of this study indicate that age plays a notable role in the sebum lipid profile, while both biological sex and biological relatedness have little to no impact on these lipids. Importantly, sebum sampling from the forehead proved to be a successful sampling approach for children, as children appeared enthusiastic about participation and samples were collected rapidly and painlessly. Together, these results equip researchers with information necessary for designing effective, sebum-based biomarker studies, and they demonstrate that sebum collection is an ideal sampling approach for biomarker studies in children.