Nomenclature

Goslin: A Grammar of Succinct Lipid Nomenclature

Kopczynski D, Hoffmann N, Peng B, Ahrends R

Analytical Chemistry · 2020 doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.0c01690 ↗ lifs-tools.org/goslin ↗

The idea

Lipid names are written inconsistently across labs, tools and databases — which silently breaks any attempt to compare datasets. Goslin defines lipid shorthand nomenclature as a formal grammar, so a parser can recognise the many name dialects in use and rewrite each one into a single, canonical form.

Key concepts

Context-free grammars describe the structure of lipid names precisely, the way a programming language is parsed.

Names are resolved onto the hierarchical shorthand levels, from sum-composition species up to structure-defined.

One shared specification, implemented as libraries in C++, Python, Java and R, so every tool behaves identically.

What we found

The first grammar-based library to parse and normalize multiple lipid-name dialects.

For each parsed name it returns the monoisotopic mass, sum formula and LIPID MAPS category/class.

Became the shared naming foundation reused across the LIFS tool suite, including LipidSpace.