 Shotgun lipidomics was developed by Richard W. Gross and Xianlin Han, by employing ESI intrasource separation techniques.Individual molecular species of most major and many minor lipid classes can be fingerprinted and quantitated directly from biological lipid extracts without the need for chromatographic purification.Shotgun lipidomics is fast, highly sensitive, and it can identify hundreds of lipids missed by other methods — all with a much smaller tissue sample so that specific cells or minute biopsy samples can be examined.